Innovating Beyond Boundaries Ft William Klehm

Welcome to the Parallel Entrepreneur, where our guest today is William Clem, goes by Bill Clem, and often my friend, Bill. I am so excited to have you join us today on the Parallel Entrepreneur, where we are exploring, defining, and trying to distill some of the lessons of what it takes to take more than one business through the life cycle from start to sale.

What are some of the lessons? And just for our audience, Bill and I have known each other for 20 years. He's a fantastic consultative, professional visionary. I could string a bunch of words together, but Bill, welcome to the show. show. Mark, thank you so much for having me. it's an honor to do stuff with you. So thanks for the opportunity to share the journey and just have a good time.

Yeah, well, I feel, you know, let's dive right in. I feel most alive when I'm building something new. Tell me how that resonates with you. So it's interesting. So I've been very blessed in my career to manage a bunch of the various disciplines around running a business. So I was trained inside of Ford Motor Company and it was an amazing training.

In one way it's confining, but in other ways, structurally supporting. when you take a tour of duty through sales, marketing, finance, engineering, operations, and you have to go literally make all those things go. You do understand the role that they play in a business or in a business situation. So you learn, I learned how to apply those disciplines and rigor to an entrepreneurial environment, which there are no borders, are no rules.

You're just gonna go figure it out. But for me, the discipline of learning all these things and not have it be a mystery of what finance is. What's a balance sheet? What's income statement? What does really cashflow really mean? What's day sales outstanding? How does all this stuff stick together into a business? And why is cashflow the most important thing in a business on a day-to-day basis?

mean, just the things that you learned, that I learned inside of the company taught me how to do that outside the company and the company was Ford. I remember, I have these vivid memories of these events in my business life in which fundamental changes happened. I remember we were spinning off a $28 billion asset of Ford Motor Company and taking it public called Vistion.

And I was on the leadership team and we were working like crazy to try and spin this thing outside of Ford. And it just was... It was an entrepreneurial journey inside of a huge company to make a startup company out of a parts operation. So being able to watch that all happen and live with that was, it was, it was, it wasn't invigorating.

mean, incredibly invigorating, but also it was comforting because once you've seen it go through a journey, you know what the journey looks like. So you recognize where all these things kind of fit within a system. to be able to create value. Anyway, that's kind of the basis of me. The other thing about me is I have this insatiable desire to just learn and to create experiences and understandings.

Again, I literally could talk about this all day, but I think that's the beginning about this. That's excellent. So you were inside Ford. You spun out of parts business. public, learned some of the mechanics of that. And then you spun out and you became an entrepreneur and started a journey that I've known. I've known you as an inventor, a husband and, and, and shepherd of inventors taking new stuff to market.

Let's talk about that. that. So it's funny. I talk to my dad. My dad was a big influence on my life. And my dad invented the CD-ROM. So my dad's in the Smithsonian for inventing, being able to take analog information and digitize it and put it onto a format and store it. And I remember my dad bringing home the phone. there.

Do people really, really know what they just heard? My dad invented the CD-ROM. You lived. Yeah, that's like the sage story. The lessons from dad. you know, it's when your dad walks into into dinner, because we always had family dinner. When dad walks into dinner with the first CD-ROM and it's, you know, as big as a, as a regular 33 record or a, or a, yes, it's a big, it's a full-size record.

and sets it on the table and tells my brother, my sister, my mom and I that you could put the entire Library of Congress on this. And it was amazing. And just that was dinner. So dinner for me was that. But imagine as a 10, 13 year old kid and your watch, you don't understand what it means with a CD-ROM because nobody had ever made them before.

So I had no idea what the impact was going to be. but I watched my dad do that. And so I realized that all that aspect, all of that inventing, because it isn't just the bits and bytes, it's how to make it affordable, how to make a product market fit, how to take information and think about it at scale. It's interesting if you can make this one little thing, but if you can make it into a business and into a business system, how does that all work?

So that was... That was the, so as a kid, I wasn't afraid of that because I watched my dad do that, right? I watched my dad grew up. So we grew up in Detroit. I wanted to work for the Ford Motor Company since I was five years old. My dad hated cars, thought cars were stupid. Loved technology, loved airplanes. We had airplanes.

So talk about ridiculous. Airplanes are not a great investment, but my dad loved airplanes. So they were cool. I loved cars and airplanes. So. So, but anyway, so that was me as a kid. Me as a kid was this constant journey. And then when I learned to apply it in business, you know, I remember, and my dad had passed away, but I remember sitting in the room with the inventor of the transmission.

And I remember there was a gentleman sitting across the table from me who was a very high-end engineer and who had been assessing the technology. And I... I understood where he was going with the technology, even though I don't have a technical degree. I just understood how what was happening physically into the inside the transmission.

So I could immediately see how a business could be created off the back of that. just thought about the product market fit, you know, how the dynamics of what it was going to mean to a vehicle system or a system. And so I said, let's start a business. So That was, I was, I was running a very successful dealer services business at the time.

And I quit to start a business. quit to, I'd never raised capital before in my life ended up raising almost a quarter of a billion dollars for that company. I'd never raised capital. I'd never started a business. But at 38 years old, I just decided I was going to do it and jump in the pond. I jumped into the pond. Courage feels a lot like fear when you're in it.

And at the same time, you've got some wisdom that you're carrying forward. My grandfather always, I like to refer to wisdom that I picked up from grandfather. He'd say, you know, Mark, if you want to be successful, you got to leave a little something on the table for the next guy. And it sounds like your dad gave you a sense of fearlessness.

Talk about this startup experience. Now, this is your first entrepreneurial venture and you are a parallel entrepreneur. So we're going to get to that. This, this, it was a manufacturing activity. It was brand new invention. Yeah. I mean it was a mechanical device that had never been used or invented before. There's a guy, he was the founder of Kleiner Perkins and so...

they had made an offer to invest in us. And so I was up back and forth in Silicon Valley for quite a while. And John Doerr, very smart man, asked me the best question ever in 35 years of being in business. And that was, why did this technology become available today? And don't tell me it's because somebody invented it, because that's a weak-minded answer.

And I told him, thank God you gave me the out, because that was going to be my answer. But I went home, I flew home. And I called him the next day and I said, okay, I changed my answer. And said, what's the answer? I said, what this is, is a convergence of technology. The only reason this technology can be made viable today is because of what's happening in computing.

So the ability to analyze, to spare pieces of information and turned into predictable outcomes. That was just now the ability to take massive amounts of data, process it and get outcomes. That was really just starting then. mean, just starting for the common human. mean, you could go to the Cray supercomputers and run those calculations, but you couldn't on your desktop.

And so this technology became viable because of the convergence of additional technology that created the ability to analyze what was going on inside the device. So this was a series of ball bearings that that come together and are put under an enormous amount of pressure. And there's a fluid that resides in between the two spheres as they're rolling or the two elements.

And you have to transfer shear force on a viscous solid, which means a fluid that turns into a solid. And you had to predict how that was gonna work. And you had to predict it against these rolling things that are rolling at 40 meters per second in opposite directions. It was insane. as far as the technology goes. So in that business for me, that was technology risk.

So I had to raise capital to offset technology risk because you had the great unknown. When you have a brand new mechanical or a brand new device, there's so much design of experiments that goes into that. But your design of experiments is not commercial. Your design of experiments is to get a predictable outcome out of the device.

And so that was the first time I had to do that. and lead a company to go do that. I had, so for me, what made sense to me is to reduce the amount of cycle time between inventions. So I had to figure out and put a capital structure in place to reduce that cycle time. So I had full engineering inside, I had full prototype, I had full metrology to make sure that the prototype met the, you know, met the print.

Then I had full tests. So, built 28 test stands or random 24 hours a day, seven days a week to be able to go through this iteration because I knew as a small company, my competitive advantage was I could iterate faster than anybody. The second competitive advantage that I had to leverage was this was a very valuable idea and very valuable ideas have to have a protection strategy.

And so we built a patent portfolio. My dad had a bunch of patents, so I was familiar with the word. I had never built them before, but we put together 800 patents and 16,000 patent claims to protect that technology. And so I went all in. My dream was to build a business from my garage that we sold for a billion dollars.

That was my dream. Didn't sell for a billion, it sold eventually for 400 and something million dollars. part of the way there. And I wasn't there at the sale. I did incubate and create a business that started in a garage, literally, and sold for a huge amount of money and pure technology play. So for me, that entrepreneur journey, I had one set of risks I had to go manage, and that was technology risk.

Realistically, I had a second set of risks, and that was money risks. because this animal had to be fed a lot to be able to develop a brand new piece of technology. I remember taking the bicycle transmission to a show. It was an engineering show around advanced hybrid drive trains and there's hundreds, millions of dollars worth of hardware in this room.

And I wheel a bicycle in and everybody's looking at me like, why does he have a bicycle? And then I asked this engineer, Have ever ridden a CVT on a bicycle? You can't put a CVT on a bicycle. Go ride one. By the 20 minutes later, every other display was empty. And I had a circle around me of mechanical engineers because it was impossible in their mind to be able to do this, right?

It was impossible. One of the things I talk about engineers is engineers are frustrated artisans and they're frustrated by the math and physics frameworks, so the picture frame that they're put in front of, and the math and the physics are what they're taught. So they try, but they're always trying, they're always artists, right?

So they're always trying to color outside the lines and get outside the borders. And what I loved about that job was I loved the fact that we got to do what everybody said was impossible. That's one of the things I loved about that job. Yes. You know, when everybody, when all my friends who has, left this very profitable auto dealer services business and we were crushing it.

I quit my job to a startup and they all thought I was insane by the perspective though, right? You were attacking the transmission, the shift gear transmission, the industry standard. And you were attacking in the cycling industry, gears and sprockets and chains and front gear. back gear ratios. You were essentially dismantling everything that everybody had invested in.

How did you penetrate the market? Not only was it inventive and the engineers loved it, but you also had to get get consumers. That must have been an adventure. yeah. Let me tell you the multi-dimensional side of this. So I had two businesses within the business. I had a business I made bicycle transmissions because what I wanted to do is I had to prove to the world that a transmission could be created with this device and it had to go into the world's most efficient drivetrain.

So the world's most efficient drivetrain is the bicycle. So one unit of energy at the pedals equals one unit of energy on the ground. Almost zero losses, right? So I called a bio-hybrid. So there's zero losses. So I wanted to make a transmission that would go in that environment because nobody had ever done that before.

if I could... and ours was never light, but it needs to be light enough that, you know, that it's one or two water bottles. But to your point, the skeptics were everywhere, right? Can't be done. you're going to see all these losses. All I did, go ride it. because I could make an experience, right? Because the technology is never what the technology does.

The technology is, how does it make the consumer feel? And how do they value that experience? And what we created was the standard for ridership for what I call city and urban bikes. created the experiential standard. And once I had that identified and nailed down, We just started to click through customers and you watch this thing started to take hold.

We started in Holland. So the world of the bicycle business, right, is, center of gravity right there in Amsterdam. per human revenue on bicycles is the highest in the world. So what I wanted to do is to go where the market made the most money and that's the Dutch market. And then we went to Benelux, which is, know, Belgium, Luxembourg and Northern Germany.

So then we expanded to there. So when I, it was funny. was, my wife, current wife and I were dating. And so she and I, I had to go over to Europe because we're going to launch the transmission. So I, but I wanted to go see bike stores. I had to take the bike with me and I had to talk to the bike shop owners myself. I was the CEO, chairman.

So I flew a bike over there, went with her and we drove all over Holland to go visit bike stores. And that was our first international date. She's still married to me. So that's, it obviously worked some well, but, but the experience of doing that and then bringing the, what the retail as close to the consumer and even consumers.

as close to the consumer as I could get and then bring that feedback back into the system, it became relatively overwhelming. Second thing we did was, is that when we were launching the transmission, again, we're in Holland, I have a launch customer, which is the Dutch National Bicycle Company called Batavis. And so the guy who ran it is a very good friend of mine now, Rob Bissett, he was just a business acquaintance at the time.

So Rob and I agreed, we had to go find out what consumers really liked about this. We had to go talk to people. So we sent a team of people, he and I together, into a thousand consumers' homes. And we asked them, what are the three reasons, or the three drivers, for you buying an e-bike or a bike? And it was quality of the seat and the touch points.

It was the quietness of the drive train. And it was maintenance or lack of maintenance. Those are the three drivers. And as I tell people, I can't do much about the seat. but I got the quietest drive train and no maintenance. So that became our mantra. And Mark, that was kind of the beginning of creating that traction.

We started with the consumer and came back up through the manufacturer. And when they all saw the data and they all saw what consumers liked about it, we just started picking them off. So at this time, I'm working with my junior high and high school best friend, Tony Ellsworth, and we're inventing the ride. And it's, I believe, the first bicycle manufactured in the United States with a constantly variable planetary drive.

Smooth, smooth, wonderful engineering, classic Ellsworth, handcrafted bicycle quality. And I'm beginning this adventure. I'm going to start SwiftWix. So here we are. I'm manufacturing socks in Tennessee, bikes in Vancouver or Washington. We're on this adventure. And you're doing a global startup, which is another challenge, I think.

So you take these lessons that you're learning and you wind up up, see this baby, this idea come to market, you see the adoption in the consumer and ultimately in the dealer and manufacturing cycles. So what are some of the lessons? I'm curious, what's your greatest lesson on what not to do and how did you learn it?

Greatest lesson, boy, there's so many interesting ones. I would say probably there's, three super powerful lessons. One lesson is if you've done the homework and you know you're right, you don't need to brag and poke people in the eye, but don't be afraid to stand behind your right. Do the math, do the homework, be ready and defend a position because that's what leadership does.

There is no powerful company that was started and somebody didn't stick their face out there to create change and know they were right and make it happen. You can't make it happen unless you know you're going to make it happen. You just can't, right? That's my experience. So that's one. So if you know it, do it. Second thing is, and this is an enormous experience for me because I've done it right and I've done it wrong, pick your team wisely.

and make sure that your team is your team and make sure everybody knows what's going on. And in these environments that are constantly changing and keeping in mind, Mark, as you know, right? Day one, you're running, everything's happy. Day two, you know, things turn not so good and you got to go pull it out of the ditch.

You need everybody on the same page. So everybody needs to know what's going on. So transparency as a leader is super important with these small teams. So having everybody come and lock arms with you and go forward, super, super, super important. Number three, when you're going to raise capital, say no if you know the capital's not right.

Having toxic capital in your equity stack or your debt stack, that creates enormous amounts of misalignment, which I think is hugely detrimental. Alignment, like I mentioned earlier on your management team, is hugely important. But alignment with your investors and making sure that everybody knows what the play is, and either they're on board or they're gonna let you run the show.

Because a lot of times you get what I call the drive-by guys that come in and they throw. a helicopter, helicopter parents or drive by advice or whatever, they just come by, throw things at you and then leave, right? So they're not invested in your situation and what you've got to pull off. So making sure that you have alignment.

had 356 investors. raised $165 million from those. I raised a couple, you know, 35 or $40 million in debt. and I knew every single one of them. I sold every I had never raised money before my life, right? So I, went from, you know, never doing this to selling my shorts on, you know, literally selling every day, selling investors selling the marketplace, selling your employees.

So you, you always have to continue to sell and market yourself. Because if you start to lose the confidence of any one of those branches in the system, that's when that's when things get difficult is when you're is when you have misalignment and you start to have these friction points in around the business. So if you have to start with it square, otherwise it doesn't go well.

So when you find yourself struggling or things are kind of coming off the rails. it requires your skill and talent, lots of energy. How do you recalibrate? What's your secret for recalibrating when that happens? One, never be afraid to say no. Never be afraid to say whatever. Whatever has to happen, you have to do it. So you gotta be out front and letting things linger and letting things fester does not work, right?

You have very fragile systems in these startups. And so unnecessary friction and unnecessary conflict, it just causes a problem, right? It's just energy you can't get back. One of the things I always talk about is time is the only thing that you can't buy more of. so time multiplied times the amount of humans you have in and around you and what they're doing.

So one of the other things I talk about is you have to create an environment that what is important to you is equally or more important to everybody in your ecosystem. You have to get disproportionate amount of their mental and physical attention. to be able to support you and your efforts because that's the way you pull things forward is if everybody, if everybody, you have everybody's attention and they're all pulling for you, right?

I talk about this all the time. In fact, I started this at Ford. When I used to, when I used to want to call somebody, call somebody, the first thing I would do is to look on their calendar to see if they were in a meeting. And then I would call them and leave them a message on their desk. I see you're in a meeting. you know, on whatever subject, give me a call when you get out.

You know what, that little technique got me called back 99 % of the time because the person who took the phone call recognized that I took the time to find out what meeting they were in. And I made a connection with them on understanding what their thoughts were. And so I would get a call back. So again, I learned all these little tips and I went and I tried to continue to find those little tips to be able to meet.

Getting a phone call a day a day before somebody else would get a phone call. That's a day. These days start to add up as you as you're trying to move this forward. And Mark, as you know, you can't buy another day. No, you got to spend time choosing your advisors. My dad said this, you know, Mark, choose your advisors carefully and then listen to them.

So you had you had a lot of energy going into these relationships. So time, speed, response, responsiveness is important. I want to. Fast forward into your parallel entrepreneurship experience. Talk about where you are today. Cause the parallel entrepreneur is a study in the lessons of time management, the lessons of prioritization, keeping capital happy, keeping teams happy.

And these companies are often at very different stages of their evolution. One's a startup and a passion project. The other one is a honeypot. The other one you're trying to take public. And I've had the experience of taking public. I've had the experience of failure, you know, and the informative lessons of all the above.

So let's talk, let's bring the audience forward with what you're doing today and describe the parallel part of your entrepreneurial emergence. I went from making transmissions for bikes and e-bikes to making bikes and e-bikes. So 2008, 2010, all the way forward, I always knew e-bikes were going to explode in the US. It was just a matter of time.

You watch Europe, it's much of the overlapping culture. South America, even Asia, the biking, e-biking culture was coming here. It was gonna happen. It's now happening. So we started a business making generation three e-bikes. So we think differently about the product itself. So the product has to be a no compromises product.

So consumers who are buying these products, they don't care about what mountain bikers care about. And that is taking the bike apart and putting it back together. They don't want to take the bike apart. They want a bike that they push a button and they ride it, right? They don't want maintenance. So design and building maintenance-free e-bike that is intuitive to operate, has a drive train that feels like the hand of God is pushing you along, and that are attractive and stylish.

So that's- Can I get an amen? Can I get an amen? So yeah, so that was the standard that the guys got. And what is different about what we're doing is we're developing a channel of distribution with automotive dealerships. So that's another different thing that we're doing. So this is a nugget. This is something very special.

You're actually using. automotive distribution infrastructure and teaching dealers that it's not just about four wheels, it's about mobility. It's about the mile, right? It's about the decision consumers are making on what they're going to do for the next mile they're going to ride or drive or walk, right? For that mile of mobility.

So in America, a single human being, 119 million times a day gets in a car and drives. 119 million times. One individual gets into a vehicle and drives it. A third of those rides are less than one mile. So 30 million rides a day are less than one mile. So we identified that as we want to own the one mile ride, the one mile decision.

So this is a decision consumers make. When I get up in the morning and go to the gym, it's a 1.8 mile trek to the gym for me. I can either get in my car or I can decide to take my e-bike. Right? So me, I'd take my e-bike, but that's a decision. And then one of the other things I'm a student of is kind of historical things that worked and didn't work in industries.

And in automotive, in the 1980s, late 70s, 80s, and 90s, Honda, who I respect a ton, managed something called share of garage. So what is the vehicles that are in your garage and how many of those are Honda's? So motorcycles. Lawnmowers, ATVs, boats, cars, all those things were products that Honda made. So they went after share of garage.

I'm going after share of miles. So that's product number one. The largest distribution system in the world for transportation equipment is the US auto dealer market. is the most valuable distribution network in the world for transportation equipment, a trillion dollars in revenue. I I can go into all the statistics, but They're bigger than most of the, the U S auto dealer market is larger than most countries in the world as far as a G comparing it to GDP.

So that is take this product set and stick it down that channel. So that's what we're doing. That's, that's business number one. We, we piloted, we got our vehicles done. We got our vehicles ready. Vehicles are beautiful. They're amazing. They don't break. All that stuff works. Now we're learning. how to help dealers sell.

So now the journey has shifted from selling the dealers to being able to help dealers convert customers to buy. So that's the current journey of Eblis. That's what we're doing with Eblis. 18 months ago, I was asked to be on the board of an artificial intelligence company called Engage. three guys, super great humans. That's one of my rules, by the way.

Don't do business with. blanks and I don't do things I don't want to do. So both of these things matched these three gentlemen. Very high-end, sophisticated AI developers. These guys are amazing. And they were doing business assessment of business operations on some, excuse me, some auto body shops. So they were doing analysis using an AI tool.

And so they asked me to be on the board to think about how to structure the deal with the company and then what to do. So as they were running down the road on this analysis, I made note that they were getting an exhaust coming off of their analysis that was potentially another product. this is of my favorite terms, exhaust product.

Listen, it's amazing. And it's even more prevalent today. because there's so many technology journeys in which the output can be applied to multiple markets. There's so many functional things around technology today that you can apply if you think about it in advance. And the guys who are in the business would tell you that I pointed out to them day one about what this opportunity really was for them.

And so I made a deal with the company that my LLC, second half LLC, is going to be the commercial go-to-market company for their artificial intelligence products for automotive. So I have taken that vertical with a business relationship with them, and we have created a predictive model in which with four pictures and 45 seconds, we can give you a 95 to 97 % accurate assessment on what it's going to take to fix your car after it's been an accident.

So you take four pictures on the side of the road and upload them in 45 seconds, you get an answer that's 95 to 97 % accurate. Because the NLP, the learning modules inside this firm have analyzed hundreds of thousands of repairs and can look at these car, look at the dimensions of the car and actually can predict its outcome.

This has been tested by a bunch of independent companies, all great. So what we decided to do, I'm already in car dealerships with e-bikes. What we decided to do was to offer this at a super affordable price tag for all auto dealers. So today, auto dealers, they spend between 10 and $15,000 a month to get kind of similar analysis.

It isn't quite as good. And so we offered the product to dealerships on what I call an unlimited pull basis. So you pay 300 bucks, 330 bucks a month. And you can do run as many cars, as many analysis as you want to run as a car dealer. And the value proposition for the car dealer is so big. Think about service customers, taking pictures of them and giving the customer an independent assessment.

You got dinks and scratches on your car. And then, so that was one. Think about used car trade ins. There's so many different places to use this little tool. And so we're offering this as a as an independent tool to car dealers for 330 bucks a month. I call it affordable advanced technology because nobody else has this kind of technology at this level.

And we wanted to give it to the dealers at a price tag that was like them buying 10 cases of pop for their soda machines on a monthly basis. So we wanted to disintermediate the market by offering this super high value technology. super inexpensively. So you know what I'm hearing? And for me, it's all about connecting the dots.

When you're in one company and then you see opportunities to extend, they don't have to be in the same industry. They could be in the same channel. They could be in the same. They could both be manufacturing. Earlier, you said that the reason that your investors were asking you the reason that this new Vinci constant variable planning, variable drive product was ready for market.

You talked about it being a convergence of technologies and manufacturing capability. What you just touched on was another convergence of AI and channel marketing and disintermediation disruption. This is another startup and you are completely destroying a function that has been consuming time creating frustration for consumers.

The second thing I heard earlier was that you went to Holland, you went and got intentionally close to the customer, the customer feedback, that direct injection of customer perspective in the leadership and thought process of leadership. So here you are going directly to the dealers and seeing and making these other connections.

How do you know when it's time to act? How do you know when it's time to make a pass, you know, you see, you must see a lot of connections because of your skill sets. Yeah, so I have said no more times than I've said yes, right? So I had a deal that we were looking at with a very interesting piece of hardware with an interesting business model to be sold through car dealers and and other and other repair centers.

But, you know, the deal wasn't right because the counterparty on the other side didn't have realistic requirements for or realistic expectations of legal agreements. They just didn't have realistic expectation. I'm not going to educate them. It's not, you know, I'm just going to, it was a great idea. I loved a lot of things about it.

I love the core technology. I loved some things, but that aspect wasn't right. so, to something that you'd had to say no to or you just, yeah. know, said, listen, appreciate you very much. Just, just not going to work. I think being able to say no quickly and being able to be kind saying no, think is also important, right?

This isn't, this isn't personal. It just doesn't fit for me and where I am. And it doesn't mean it's not the right thing. It doesn't mean it's not the right market. It just means for my set of things about what I want to spend time on all that stuff. That doesn't work for me. So recognizing that and being brave enough to just walk, that's very important.

So everybody is interested in the impact of AI right now. I don't think I have any conversations that don't talk about capital and AI and talent. If I said those are the three most important words in business, I might not be wrong. What do you think is happening right now amongst us, between us, to us? What's happening with this convergence of quantum computing and AI and the way that we look at business?

and disruption and opportunity. So I say a few things about this. So artificial intelligence at its core will improve most everything that we live with today. I mean, at its core, but has to be applied. And don't underestimate the effort that it takes to apply these things to extract value because it's significant, right?

You have embedded systems that are a hundred years old, maybe longer, maybe shorter, but they're embedded. So that journey of change, or whatever there's change in customers' mind, there's loss. So change and loss, those two things go together always. being able to identify, just, sorry, backing up, AI will, properly deployed, will improve the efficiency of almost everything that we do as a society.

I mean, it's going to. There's so many things it touches. This company Engage, one of the things that captured my imagination with them, is that they have re-envisioned education, and they've re-envisioned it differently. So each student inside of one of their schools gets an AI assistant from the time they're five years old.

And that AI assistant grows with them all the way until they graduate from high school. So they have an AI tutor. that learns with them and watches how Mark learns. How does Mark think about these things? But then think about the continuum of that AI training, working with a student. mean, me as a child, if I had that, that would have been transformational for me.

If I would have had an AI, a coach at a young age. So if you just think about that, just that little nugget that captured my imagination with Engage. If I just think about that in and of itself and what that journey that puts kids on and how we can improve that situation in education, it's amazing to me, right? And then, now I think about this for the US, Huge impact.

Can you imagine going and taking this to Mexico or taking this to underdeveloped countries and giving those children the ability... to do the same thing that happened in China on the cell phone industry, right? Nobody put wires into all these people's houses, right? They just handed them a cell phone and said, you're wire free.

So the same thing I believe can happen with AI in education and other places. I see it happening in medicine. I see it happening in drug development. I see it happening like this AI assistant. I've told the company, I want an AI assistant. get me one. mean, you know, did I can that that's going to learn me and understand how, you know, what I like in meetings and you know, how I like my follow up, all that stuff, all that innate innate of learning that you can put in there.

That's what captured my imagination about what AI can do. When I see a kid, right, a child, I've got I've got kids, you know, they don't have kids yet, but they're working on it. You just you just realize how much further we can help our children and our grandchildren evolve personally if they all had an individualized coach.

I love that idea. know, coach and coach, like to, I have this experience where I've felt like a coach. have been coached. There's always a question, are you coachable? And now I look at life more as a companion. I'm moving through the mergers and acquisitions space and taking the lessons from starting and selling six companies.

helping other entrepreneurs sell their companies. And I'm curious, you've done this several times. So talk to me about the role of a mergers and acquisition advisor in your transactions. Talk to me about some of the lessons. And when did you have to be the guy that got told no?

Fallbrook story. So a very large German auto parts manufacturer made an offer to buy us. And I worked that. I put every bit of my skill into that deal. The board decided to hire a name brand &A advisor, a name brand. But I knew the deal better than he did. But yet, at the time, I didn't have the confidence to go push on it.

And if I had to do it all over again, because the deal didn't close, we were off by a little less than 10 % on the price, and the other party walked. And again, the &A advisors are fantastic. &A advisor partner is important. And it's important to know the &A advisor is a voice at the table. The &A advisor is not the voice at the table.

I was chairman and CEO. If I had the maturity that I think I have now on this particular subject, I would have put my foot down and said, no, we're not doing that. I would have put us in another direction. We would have gotten a sale. 100 % sure of that. And I've even talked to the company since I've left, I even talked to him and asked him about it.

And they confirmed that my thinking was right. So that is another thing about me is that when I do have a learning experience or learning event, I always keep I always keep learning from it, I try and find, you know, so when I like I run it, I ran into the CEO of that company, we're still friendly. And I asked him flat out over a coffee, you know, tell me about what was happening on your side of the table.

And this is now going on 10 years ago. And so it was, I was 100 % right. The advisor had done an enormous amount of deals, incredibly skilled, I learned a bunch of things from him. But one of the things that he didn't learn from me is I knew the deal better than he did. This was personal for me, this was real for me, I I curated all these things and he was bringing a generic set of tools in on negotiating and kind of those negotiating rules.

And so if I had to do all this all over again, I would have put a border there and said, last time I checked, I'm in charge of this. It's my call. And I would have done that and pushed back on the board. I didn't at the time, I was where I was. It was a brand new journey for me. I had tried to stack the deck with the advisors and all the people around me that I thought were going to be going to add value.

But the advice was bad. It was a bad call. But to your point, you get kicked in the teeth a few times. It'll never happen again. I have lots of friends who are bankers. I have lots of friends who are advisors, including you. And I respect everybody. But at the end of the day, I'm the one who started in my garage. I'm the one this company was betting on.

I'm the one who built the patent portfolio and architected all those things. Obviously had pan attorney engineers who did the work, but just this whole vision of what to do with these assets, that was all on me. so, but I did not, I wasn't mature enough to know at that moment that I should say no. And that is one of my big lessons.

That's one of the things I respect so much about you, Bill, is that like me, you have an attitude toward relationships. It's about lifelong relationships. It's about, I heard this earlier, lifelong learning. And we completely, well, we start to deplete ourselves when we stop learning, when we stop gaining perspective. I was curious, I like to ask this question.

What is your North Star? what is my North Star? So it's, by the way, that's a great question. My North Star is doing the right thing. That's kind of, that is one of my really North Stars is just trying to do the right things. Just get up every morning, look in the mirror and say, am I making impact? Am I having influence?

Am I doing the right things for the people around me? My responsibilities are with my family and my investors. Am I honoring those? am I honoring those? so that's my number one North Star. And again, I go back to my dad. That was the lessons learned from father.

So when I was a little, kid, I started flying airplanes with my dad and I got my post license when I was 15. And so you realize when you're up by yourself in the air, you better make good choices because you're up by yourself and there's no, there's, there's, know, there's no ground. There's no friendlies, right? You're just up there in the air.

So you got choices to make. So do the right things. And I, I, that's just who I am. That's my North star. I love it. love it. We're about to wrap, but I've got this alarm going on in my ear. So we're going to pause for a second and see if we can figure that out.

losing battery. You know, I've got a... Your phone ringing, buddy? Now I have just. Okay, got it. Okay. I wasn't able to turn it off and it was just like, hope that didn't come through. Did you hear it? Okay. Yeah, I could hear it. You could hear it while you were talking. No, I heard it when you took your phone off. okay.

Good. All right. Well, let's get back into this because we're I do I know that you're about ready to take off. still recording. Great answer on the North Star. This is so much fun. This is fun.

I'm going ask you two questions, then I'm going do a rapid fire thing. So Bill, you've accomplished most of the things you've set out to accomplish. You're purposeful, you get teams put together. You've still got more goals, I'm sure. What is it that you want out of life?

Well, obviously to make impact. have influence. So I always think that those of us who have the capability of making an impact on the planet have responsibility to do so. So that's always been my mantra. That's what I want to be able to do.

The next question is rapid fire. The first thing that comes to mind, what's the last book you read? read? Thank you. Last book I read. I reread Thank You for Being Late. Isn't that the guy who wrote The World is Flat? you're like one of the very few people I've ever met who have read that book. And I'm just so impressed.

Tell me what you picked out of that. Why did you reread it? it? I reread it because the truisms that are the impact of technology on society, that was foretelling. And I just wanted to get a reminder. So I listen and I read. So I got both formats going. So sometimes I listen to one book and then I read a book. Usually I read a book and then listen to it is, and that was this.

So that's what I did. So being able to being able to sit back and relate to how fast technology is evolving, because we've had this conversation on this call, right? Technology is changing our world faster than we're accustomed to and faster than we're comfortable with. And so being able to do that and understand that, that book really talks about that.

It creates a basis by which you can frame things around that. And that's what I like. I've had most every single one of my teams. since that book came out, read that book, just because I don't agree with everything Thomas Friedman writes, but in this particular case, on this particular subject, I think he nailed it. That's going on the list.

It's one of my favorites, too. What's the next book that you're going to read? It's so funny. So I knew you're gonna ask that question. I have a book in my queue. just go screw up the name. So let me just pull up the name. Hang on one second. I love it. You've got this book in your queue. I have the same thing for Netflix.

I have that too. Hang on one second. Let me find this thing. yeah, it's called Top 10 Profit Killers. Mmm. Top 10 profit killers. In fact, it's open on my app right now. So one of the things it talks about is when you start a business, you should think about starting a business profitably, not starting a business as a loss leader.

So thinking about starting a business and operating a business differently. So this is one of the things it talks about. so in this particular evolution of me as a business, that's one of the things I... I think about and that's what I'm trying to get to. What's the best gift you've ever received?

best gift I ever received was? Wow, great question. I got so many good ones. My wife buys me cowboy boots for Christmas every year and I have a collection of them. And it's just this kind of a thing, right? But I do enjoy cowboy boots and I have since I was a little kid. So my wife every year finds me very unique cowboy boots.

I have- There's one good reason to come to Nashville. So yeah, so there's a custom shop here in Austin that my wife gets boots made for me. So again, I'm very blessed to have amazing friends and amazing family and all that other stuff. But I can say that that's a pretty thoughtful thing just because she knows I like them and she's a very good, and she dresses me well other than when I'm wearing my gym attire.

You're looking good. What's the best gift you've ever given? So the best gift I've ever given... Hmm, that's a really damn good question. Man, man, Mark, you're good at this. I know, the best gift I've ever given...

I gave my, we gave my mother-in-law who grew up in very poor rural Southern Korea, still lives there. We took her to her favorite, to a place she dreamed about going to in Korea called Jeju Island. And we took her for her birthday. And that was watching a person who grew up you know, poverty, war torn, but watching her experience her dream of going to this place that she never thought she would go to and walking on the beach and just enjoying that, that was, that was a pretty rewarding gift.

Wow, that's wonderful. If you were going on stage, and I know that you've been on stage many times, what's your walk-on song? I for whatever reason, ACDC comes to mind, I'm not really sure. Back in black, I'm not sure. I, I, you know, I always, I always think about life and business as you have one chance to be bold, you have one chance to make impact, you have one chance, right?

It's always about the one chance. And so I always just think about being on stage and having that one opportunity to make impact. I helped with a women's forum one time, it was a women's event, and I helped the leader come up with a tagline, and it was change one thing. So it was the inspiration around standing on stage and telling everybody in this thousand people in front of you, if you just changed one thing in your life.

you fundamentally change one thing. Everybody did that in this room. We'd fundamentally change the planet, right? Get a thousand people to change one thing. So for me, having that big, bold music going into saying, let's make an impact and change one thing. I love it. love it. My song, if you turned that around and asked me the question, it would be Remember the Name by Fort Minor.

know, I just always thought building that chorus, know, it's 10 % luck, 20 % skill, 15 % concentrated power of will, 50 % pleasure, 50 % pain, and 100 % reason to remember the name. I always had fun with that song. All right. Three words that define your life. Uhhhh

make impact sustainably. like it. And then the last question on the parallel entrepreneur. What is the question? Well, I forgot one. So if you could talk to your younger self, what's the first thing you would say?

Follow your instincts. Follow your instincts. Follow your instincts. You got great instincts. Second guessing is fine. Double checking is fine. But follow your instincts. I've been right about markets. I've been right about product. I've been right about things. I do have this ability to be able to see playing fields and understand impact, which is another reason why I like the book.