Summary

Dimitre shares his fascinating life journey, from growing up in Bulgaria and Nigeria to playing basketball in the United States and eventually founding Galena Hill. He discusses the pain points he experienced as a business owner and how it led him to develop an accounting intelligence system that integrates with Intuit QuickBooks. He also explains the shift towards using blockchain technology for document management and automation, with the city of Reno as a lighthouse customer. Dimitre highlights the potential market in other cities and the importance of strong recommendations and warm introductions. Dimitre discusses the application of document management workflow in various industries, not just government entities. He shares examples of startups and businesses that can benefit from this technology. Dimitre also talks about his investment strategy and the use of offshore software developers. The conversation concludes with a discussion on grit and its importance in startups and life.

Bio

Born in Bulgaria, he grew up across multiple countries including over a decade in rural Nigeria, Botswana, and South Africa. This diverse background instilled resilience and adaptability. In 1993, a basketball scholarship allowed him to relocate to the United States. His studies focused on quantitative business analysis, economic modeling, and finance.

His private-sector career from 1998-2014 spanned automotive, travel, construction, manufacturing, and consulting. As a trader, operations manager, finance director and more, he led teams, drove change, and oversaw profitable exits. This applied his expertise in process automation and business intelligence.  

Since 2014, his SaaS innovations include co-authoring blockchain patents for secure data handling and message certification. He created blockchain web apps for transparent public access. His models compared solar technologies for South African energy projects. He pioneered digital prototypes for accounting, document transmission, and medical consent.

In 2018, he founded Galena Hill Inc. to provide affordable, scalable, eco-friendly digital solutions for small businesses and government. This merged his research with pragmatic solutions to foster sustainability.

Takeaways

Dimitre's life journey took him from Bulgaria to Nigeria to the United States, where he eventually founded Galena Hill.

He developed an accounting intelligence system that integrates with Intuit QuickBooks to address the pain points he experienced as a business owner.

Galena Hill has shifted its focus towards using blockchain technology for document management and automation.

The city of Reno is a lighthouse customer for Galena Hill, and there is potential for market expansion to other cities.

Strong recommendations and warm introductions from influential figures, such as the mayor of Reno, can help facilitate business opportunities. Document management workflow can be applied to various industries, not just government entities.

Startups and businesses that deal with a lot of documents and need to guarantee their provenance can benefit from this technology.

Dimitre's investment strategy has been private investment, and he has not approached VC firms.

He uses offshore software developers, but emphasizes the importance of having a close relationship and ensuring the protection of intellectual property.

Grit is essential in startups and life, and overcoming challenges and obstacles is a continuous process.

Sound Bites

"The market niche for Galena Hill: small to midsize business owners using QuickBooks."

"The shift towards using blockchain technology for document management and automation."

"What we have is extremely convenient in terms of being able to manage that information in a way that is shared in between a city employee or a government employee and a public viewer."

"There are other organizations that deal with a lot of documents and have to guarantee the provenance of these documents."

"The painful issue is really how to get your foot in the door and have at least some initial traction."

Links

Please leave us a review: https://www.podchaser.com/AdventuresOnTheCanDo

Dimitre's Galena Hill site: https://www.galenahill.com/

The book Think Like a Startup Founder (early access): https://www.manning.com/books/think-like-a-startup-founder

Jothy’s site for speaking, podcasting, and ruminating: https://jothyrosenberg.com

Jothy’s non-profit foundation The Who Says I Can’t Foundation: https://whosaysicant.org

Chapters

00:00 Dimitre's Fascinating Life Journey

11:19 Addressing Pain Points: Developing an Accounting Intelligence System

28:40 The Power of Recommendations: Leveraging Influential Figures

35:04 Offshore Software Developers and Intellectual Property

45:34 The Importance of Grit in Startups and Life

And here's Dimitri. Welcome.

Thank you very much for having me.

Oh, it's my pleasure. It was great to begin to get to know you in our first discussion. I think it's pretty true that every startup founder has an amazing story and you're no different. Yours may be a little more amazing in some ways than many. In your bio, it covers some of your early

history, but it's probably best that you, you know, they hear it from you. So if you could just start with where were you born and then what are all the places in the world that you've lived on your way to where you are now?

Okay. Yeah. So that's the road less traveled, I guess, because I was born in Bulgaria and I was born there in the early seventies when Bulgaria was still very much under the curtain. It was behind the iron curtain. So first seven years, I pretty much grew up there in a very, how can I say, very old school type of environment. You know, we had a...

big family. We had harvesting done in the fall. I mean, we prepared food for the winter. We played out on the streets. We played in the yard. So it was just a very, very different environment from what you might find in many of the cities today. And at one point in time, my parents decided to venture out to Africa. And my dad left and moved to Nigeria for about eight months before we could join him.

And that's where my adventures began. We went from basically socialist Bulgaria to rural Nigeria. So you can imagine what the contrast was. You know, it was a completely different country, completely different geography, completely different culture. And also very, in terms of a trying environment, it was an exciting environment for a kid, but it was very trying environment for an adult to.

to raise a child so far away with very slim means at the time. According to the terms that our parents could travel, the government would basically at the time take something like 70 % of their earnings. So basically they were paying for the privilege to be able to be overseas. And some, I believe 15 years later that ended. So it became a lot easier for them to, you know, do what.

every normal person does, you know, try to advance in their life or in their career. But anyways, I went from, uh, Bulgaria behind the Iron Curtain to rural Nigeria. And by rural, I mean, rural was a hole in the wall city, uh, in the middle of, of nowhere. It wasn't in one of the major cities. And then from there, eventually, uh, my parents sent me back off home. Uh, they wanted me to educate myself in, in Bulgaria, as opposed to in Nigeria.

I became an athlete and that took me all over Europe. From there, my parents gradually moved from Nigeria to Botswana to South Africa. And at one stage, you know, after my military service in Bulgaria, I decided to go join them. So that's how I got to South Africa. And in South Africa, I got completely on a whim recruited by two incredible gentlemen to play basketball in the United States.

Um, it was, uh, uh, Del Harris, the coach of the, uh, soon to be the coach of the LA Lakers. I believe he coached Kobe and Shaq after that. And there was a gentleman by the name of Walt Hazard. He was a UCLA hall of Famer. So, you know, we had a huge tournament down there and somehow they managed to see me play. And, uh, three months later, I got a phone call and I got a full ride to Wisconsin, Milwaukee. So I actually came to America on a, just on a completely, you know, just random path. And.

So, Demetri, are you pretty tall?

I'm pretty tall, I'm 6 '6".

Okay, okay. Well, you know, these zoom calls, these, these video calls, uh, there's no, you know, I mean, you can't tell that you're six inches taller than me.

Shrinking by the month. Yes, shrinking by the month. Not a problem. And from there, I basically, because I played professionally overseas, I had a limited amount of years that I can play as a collegiate athlete. But decided to stay here and to get educated and...

Well, yeah, we are, we get to a certain age and we are shrinking. Anyway, sorry, I interrupted you. Keep going.

Being an American was pretty much my dream since a little kid. That's a whole nother story of why that is the case. But it was the place I wanted to live. It was the place I wanted to make a home in. Some 20 years later, that happened.

And where do you call home now?

I live in, we live in Reno, Nevada.

Yeah, so you're real close to California, but it's not California.

It's not California. It is literally right across the border. And, you know, when we spoke, you said you, you made that trip from California all the way up to the East coast. So, uh, but, uh, you know, I've, I've lived in Milwaukee. I've lived in a little Island called Hilton head right off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. And, you know, through work, I moved to Reno and, uh, we've made a permanent home here. It's been, I've been in Reno over two decades.

Yeah, it is nice there. And you're really close to Lake Tahoe.

It's literally across the hill from us, from where we live. So that is literally, it's 20 minutes up and down the hill.

And great skiing. Great skiing. I don't know if you're a skier.

My family is. On the other side of my family, they're all avid skiers. My wife was an avid skier. She almost made the Olympic team. Her brother is an incredible skier. He continues to ski. They ski all over the world with his dad. So they're totally into that. Our kids are, you know, they know how to do it, but you know, they do a couple of other things.

Yeah, yeah. So then that's the interesting story of how you got from place to place to place. And so you got educated in, did you say it was Wisconsin?

Well, for collegiately, yes. In between, I had started college in South Africa. So I started a college there, University of South Africa, Pretoria is where I started, transferred a few credits. And then from there, did my undergraduate and graduate in Wisconsin, yes.

And so you had just as interesting a progression in your career path that you had in your sort of life path that you described a minute ago. You've had like, I don't know, five or six careers, it sounds like, from your bio.

That is correct. That is correct. And you know, uh,

If I wanted to start from way back, my actual dream was to be a Formula One driver and a motorcycle racer. I mean, I got to being a motorcycle racer at one point, but I couldn't make it to being a Formula One driver. I grew to be way too tall. So I couldn't figure out how to get that done. But in terms of just a professional career path, as a non -resident,

alien, you know, when I came out of college, there is only so many options that I mean, basically to follow the path of, you know, distinguished worker visa and everything else, I had to find basically a niche, something unique. So in some ways for a while that the choices of career was based on, you know, essentially, how can I prove my worth? How can I do it the proper way? You know, how can I become a distinguished worker? How can I be a maintained distinguished worker status? And then from there, how can I petition for?

my residency and from our citizenship. So, you know, that process took a while and obviously it did that through my education and through the career. So, I had quite a bit of a quantitative background when I came out of college and, you know, that combined with, you know, gaining some practical experience in a non -typical industry, like for instance, a franchised car rental, you know, got this job done. So, I went from

Training as a mutual fund trader for a Wall Street firm after my graduate studies to finding a job as an operations manager for car rental franchise, becoming a partner of one through the franchise system, moving to Reno. Basically we exited that business, sold it, it was very successful. And from there kind of figuring out what else I can do in Reno. I did a...

I had like an amateur racing company set up at one point. I did a lot of, I did a lot of, you know, track tours, so to speak, but eventually went back into a construction and manufacturing as the CFO of a modular construction building plant right here in Minden, Nevada. So spent some time there. And from there, lots of the work that I've done, which was mostly, you know, profit modeling, lots of excels.

lots of data analysis, decided to turn that into a product. And that sent me on this completely different journey if I only knew how hard that would be. So from a mutual fund trader, basically to a franchise car rental manager, owner operator, to a CFO of a manufacturing plant, to a software startup founder.

So, and it's Galena Hill, is that how you pronounce it?

Galena Hill, yes, Galena Hill is the company, Galena Hill Inc.

Yeah, so great. Time to start talking about the startup and where did the idea for it actually come from?

Well, it came from the pain points that I would experience as a general manager, as an owner operator. It came from our inability to, for example, take a frontline operating statistics and KPIs and transform those into intelligence that would help us run the business. So we noticed that there was quite a big of a lag between when you find out how something works on the front end.

And eventually how that becomes finance, how it becomes accounting and finance. So, you know, we would burn the midnight oil for, for many months in anxiety, uh, trying to figure out exactly what our financial picture was as a franchise. Uh, we service huge lines of credit. You know, we had to purchase a lot of vehicles, you know, those lines of credit have covenants and basically we're in the business of always managing how, how, how money turns over for us. And.

Not being able to foresee that with speed and efficiency is really what prompted me to do a lot of pro forma type of accounting, forecasting type of accounting. So from there, the pain point of a guy like that, somebody who has a business, the business isn't exactly so small that they can do all the math in their head because there's a lot of small business owners out there who are actually very, very good at doing that. And they don't need necessarily.

to sophisticated tools like that. But to us, our operation had a pretty decent size and being able to know what's happening and how that will turn out for us a couple of months down the road or a year down the road was very important. So that's what really got me started is how can I do this in a way that we can basically see accounting coming as opposed to waiting on this verdict to hit us six to eight months later.

What's the niche market? I mean, we all try to start off by making sure we're focused on a pretty narrow market segment. What seems to be the right place to start for you guys?

Well, there's a story behind that too, because, you know, when I did this and at the time my, basically my software skills were limited to, you know, a SQL database analysis and design, you know, and ability to export data into Excel program macros. So those are my abilities at the time. And at one stage we had on the side built a forecasting system for a friend of mine.

who had a different startup and he was so happy with it that he says, you know, I'm going to take you to an investor and I want you to show them this. I want you to show them this. I called it Frankenstein because it had so many moving parts. It was scary. So we took Frankenstein to a venture capital broker right here in town and in there I met this very interesting individual. His name was Don Borwat. I believe that at one point in time he was a very high powered executive at GE. So, you know, he kind of...

took our pitch in, took a listen to what we had and said, you know, Demetri, let me just give you a few pointers here. I mean, this Excel that you've built, I mean, as powerful and as useful it can be to one person or to one business owner is something that you're going to struggle with placing into a niche. Small business owners are not that sophisticated. So they're going to struggle with managing this thing in the first place.

Larger business owners or corporations have a team of IT professionals and analysts that are already in place with tools that are already in place. So you're going to have to convince a committee of 20 people as to why they need to adopt your product and your solution as opposed to, or in some ways, maybe abandon a capital investment into some other infrastructure that they've done and go with what you have. So if you really want to standardize this product offering,

It would have to be a piece of software. It would most likely have to be something that runs online or runs in a cloud. And it would have to be integrated with a major accounting system such as Intuit.

So after that meeting is, is really when I got scared about this whole thing and, and I kind of started grasping the, the, the, the amount of work that was going to have to go in it. And you know what I sat here, we talked with my wife and I quit my job and I said, you know what, we're just going to go ahead and build this. We're going to create an accounting intelligence system that integrates with Intuit QuickBooks. And for certain industries is also.

able to output predictive analytics in a way that a business owner can have financial clarity, can have a much more forward looking vision. So that's really where we embarked and it was probably a really long answer to your question, what was the market niche? And at the time, our thesis was that the market niche was the small to midsize business owner who has a QuickBooks accounting management system.

And does it occur to you that if you're really successful, that Intuit might come calling?

Well, probably like any founder, you know, like any founder, the dream that you start with is not necessarily very realistic. Obviously that was a big dream of mine. And at the time when we started Intuit QuickBooks online was a fairly small market sized tool, but it was growing at a rate of something like 50 to 60 % a year.

So at the time it probably had less than a million users. And I believe at this point it probably has six or 7 million users. Offline, their offline accounting system had another six to 7 million users. So yes, that was really a premise of ours is to, you know, along the way also generate some IP. We believed we had some ideas that were patentable and to see how they can scale down the road.

So do you feel like you've gotten it far enough that you are beginning to understand product market fit? Have you already passed the point of a minimum viable product? I assume you have that.

For the point of a minimal valuable product, I believe we've passed that a couple of times. And obviously none of them have caught fire. So we became very good at writing software. That took a little bit of time. And my premise on that was also to do this in a way that we have reusable infrastructure.

such that if we're gonna engage four to five engineers during the course of a year, if we end up with an idea that doesn't work, 60, 70 % of that infrastructure can be pointed towards a different product or a different embodiment, different solution. So that took about a year and a half to build. And we have that to this day, we have a pretty mature, pretty viable enterprise cloud. It's sponsored by Microsoft at level four.

And that came a little bit further down the road for a different reason. But yes, we took the Intuit QuickBooks app into the Intuit app store. It was called Areen, it still is. And we made quite a few attempts to market it. We went to accounting conventions, we traveled overseas, we went to shows in Melbourne, Australia. And I believe I told you this story too, is that's when we started finding out that reaching this B2C audience.

is a much harder task than building the product or building the MVP. Getting your hands around the MVP is hard enough as it is. It's a very skirmish deal. The product owner is here, the software engineers are here, and there is always... You need a really, really strong bridge in between. And those are the things that I discovered because I came from a...

a management background, I came from financial background, from operating a business that had nothing to do with making a product from scratch, right? So, and with a lot of confidence and a lot of optimism. So throwing myself into this realm of, you know, now we're basically conceiving, we're building something that hasn't been built before exactly in that manner. And...

We have a premise that, you know, all these business owners are going to like it or CPAs are going to like it because we also tried that. CPAs have a book of account and they manage the books for all kinds of small businesses. So we figured this tool would be very useful to them when it came to diligence and companies that would save them a lot of time and effort. But it turned out they didn't want to save a lot of time and effort because they'd rather spend the time and bill for it. So, you know, along this way, we built the Aureen app.

At that point, blockchains, NFTs were just emerging, the crypto kitties and these crypto exchanges were, most of them were not even in place yet. Bitcoin was a phenomenon. It was growing at an incredible rate. So we decided to look into the distributed ledger as a non -financial tool and see how we can use that and legitimize the diligence process such that, you know,

certain amounts of data, financial statements, files, et cetera, can be transformed into digital originals and secured and again, be used in a way that if you're a business owner and let's say you're a diligent thing, a bank, or if you're transmitting information business to business, there is a 100 % guarantee that what you're transmitting is forever immutable. And the information is it's encrypted, safe and secure and incorruptible.

So that sent us to MVP number two, which was essentially a data encrypted data transmission system with a blockchain notary system attached to it. And now since then we're looking for the product market fit of that. The closest we've come is a prototype grade solution that we built for the city of Reno, Nevada, which they're very happy with.

And now we're looking to extend that technology into just document management across the state in Nevada. Thankfully, we live in a very blockchain friendly state. And as of recent, we have legislature that makes this technology legal. Or so we're interpreting. So I believe we're knocking on the door of product market fit and starting from accounting intelligence and going all the way into document management for government.

It's been again a road less traveled, but I believe we're setting on some very functional and exciting technology in terms of it being able to process a very, very high number of transactions at a very low cost, allowing for significant profitability if it is adopted.

So would you describe the city of Reno as sort of your lighthouse customer?

Yes, to a large extent, yes.

Um, what level person is your main champion there? Is it like the, the mayor?

It's the mayor of Reno. Yep. It's the mayor of Reno, Ms. Hillary Shieve. Go ahead. I'm sorry. That's the top. So we started from the top. Our CEO, Bob Layton is a former city of Reno manager. He was in place there for 25 years and probably the hardest job in the city, which is emergency management. He was a fire chief.

That's the best.

So he is very well known and respected there. And, you know, with the, with Mayor Sheave, what we found in there is a very, very progressive, very open -minded leadership, very technologically oriented leadership. We met with her, we met with her. There was an officer there that worked specifically on, on technology and innovation. And it was one of the best meetings we've ever had. You know, we.

She was incredibly accommodating and curious. We spent in our first meeting, you know, we had her tied up for almost three hours. She, we wouldn't, we couldn't stop. So they got really excited about that. And at the time they had had a blockchain project, which they were not super happy with. And obviously it didn't go, it didn't go the way they expected it. So we took that project over and in 52 days, we managed to ship, uh, uh, something that.

essentially expanded their requirements fivefold to what it previously was. And the output of, and basically the value added there was that in about two or three days, the city of Reno staff were able to input all of their data into the system that would previously take them about a year.

That's amazing. Now, so is...

Is city government?

Is it wrong of me to sort of assume that, okay, if this works for the city of Reno, obviously cities of similar plus or minus size are gonna have the same exact problem. So is that a market?

Well, we believe that it is. We absolutely believe that it is. And to the extent that, you know, documentation exchange or signing with a blockchain is the smaller niche, but really the big niche is automation. Automation is really the big niche. So how we engage with the city to automate certain processes that are currently manual and in a way that, you know, it helps them grow for the future such that...

You know, it's not necessarily that you're replacing staff. It's more that you're empowering staff and you're allowing them to do a lot more with less. As you know, Microsoft is a big champion in artificial intelligence as well. And through our sponsorship with Microsoft, we've also managed to gain access to these private large language model deployments. They're basically chat GPT technologies, which allow you to analyze and...

How can I say this simply? Basically talk with your data in a way that you have your own AI deployment, which runs up in the Microsoft Azure cloud, and it is connected to data that is private. So unlike the public chat GPT or unlike the public AI services where your information is used to train the AI, but it's also shared. I mean, anyone else can be the beneficiary that here you can set these things up and turn them into.

what Microsoft likes to call co -pilots or experts in a domain. They can speak a specific language. If you have IP, they can be trained to analyze and speak to that. So we're looking at now using this technology combined with our blockchain notaries in a way such that it automates processes for Reno and for the state of Nevada in general, where you have a significant high volume of document exchange, so to speak.

So we have another sales meeting coming up here this week with the city of Reno. And we have another one at the end of the month with the Nevada secretary of state where basically we're now going department for department, whether it's building permits or special events, et cetera. And we're looking to see how this cloud infrastructure and this, this technology that we have can, can accommodate their needs.

Wiggle, um...

Will the people that are like the mayor in particular, he said it's a, I was about to use a pronoun. Is it she? Did you say she? Okay. So will she make really strong recommendations, warm introductions to her counterparts in other cities, you think?

It's her, yes, Hillary. Yes. Hillary Shivi.

Well, we've had one already. We've had an introduction to the city of Sausalito. So we've spoken there with mayor Melissa Bloustein and two of her staff as well. One was the IT director and the other one was one of her managers. The city of Sausalito is sizeably smaller than Reno, but because of the rapport that we've built and because of their experience on working with us on building this first product, we already have that introduction.

Mm -hmm.

So we're waiting to see if we can replicate the exact same system and connect them or essentially manage some of their record keeping online, especially in cases where a particular record needs to be shared with the public. Obviously in cities, pretty much everything is public information. But for example, when it comes to historic property records or where it comes to any other record that needs to be displayed, and there is a good reason for why authenticity,

Fabulous.

is needed. What we have is extremely convenient in terms of being able to manage that information in a way that is shared in between a city employee or a government employee and a public viewer. So this has been our starting point with the City of Reno. And like you said, we're hoping that it catches fire, hopefully even beyond the state of Nevada.

And I'm trying to think of, are there really things about Citi or other government entities that are particularly, that have a particular need for this? Or now is this starting in your mind to generalize to just organizations that deal with a lot of documents and have to guarantee

the provenance of these documents. But there's a lot of organizations other than cities and government entities that that description would apply to.

There are, we've looked at two other use cases. One of them was, there's a very interesting startup here in Reno. And what they do is since COVID began, obviously, they got in the business of taking these legal depositions online. So they're essentially the custodian, the manager, they're the intermediary. They're a part of essentially how any sort of forensic data or any sort of deposition data is housed.

So we've had some serious discussions with them and seeing how this document management workflow can be applied to their business where that guarantee or the need for that information to be secure or for the need to know who's touched what or to have this permission based access. And also not only that, but in terms of what we have, the information can be directly transmitted or accessible to the courts or to any other.

government official or any other party that is allowed to use it. So the ease of use and the amount of manual labor or the amount of otherwise receding or transmission that it would take via standard means is tremendous. In our own business, we had a similar process to where we needed a document receipt for every bill that we sent out. We were a subcontractor bidding to a general as a manufacturing facility. We're bidding these public projects.

And our FedEx bill was upwards in the $60 ,000 a year because of all this, just a gigantic amount of information that we needed to send, but we needed to guarantee that information is delivered and that those originals are placed in the hands of the people that need to have them. Our technology digitizes all of this. So.

To not niche it specifically to government and to say that it's applicable in many other industries to where the secured exchange information or audit trails related to how information was transmitted and managed applies, I believe it absolutely does. The issue is, as I have found out, the painful issue is really how to get your foot in the door and have at least some initial traction such that the business can...

now start growing out of organic revenue as opposed to capital investment.

And what is the investment strategy for you guys?

Well, for me, it's always been private investment to this point. I've never approached a VC firm. I think I told you this, my company shares are non -dilutable. So basically every time I sell shares from Galena Hill, I'm diluting my ownership. I mean, this to me is, well, obviously it's very different than the way the standard VC process works. And it also limits the amount of capital.

that you can intake before you lose control. But my premise was to get to market and manage this from an organic revenue standpoint when I first started. And again, looking at how some of the bigger unicorns or bigger software companies are being managed, how their cycle from startup to IPO occurs, and how much money...

has to be invested on a continuous basis for these companies to get large and to scale is pretty scary.

Yeah, certainly is. And then are you using offshore software developers or are they all local?

Well, we're using mostly offshore. I'm using mostly offshore, but each of them has a story. I've been to each of their country. I've lived in India. I've been to Italy. I've been to South Africa. So I've worked with some guys that we became very good friends with. They're extremely professional. They have a ton of experience. They get a lot done with less, but at the end of the day, they have a...

We have a personal relationship and a personal contact. So there is a lot of integrity and quality in the work that we put out.

That's good.

That's a, if you're gonna do offshore, it's good that you have a relationship, because I've seen a lot of offshoring that you basically.

The majority of the offshoring that I've seen, they're not doing the hardcore engineering. They're doing kind of the stuff around the edges. And, you know, that's fine, but you probably need more than that.

Well, you need a lot more than that. And this is why my hiatus or my transition into this business was to become a software engineer and become a coder. At this point I have over probably about 12 ,000 hours of coding. I've paired myself with guys that are far smarter than me, far better than me, far more professional than me. But like in any business, it's almost like if you, if you don't understand how the frontline works, it, it, it, you, you either need a partner that does.

or it's probably the wrong business for you to be in. So, I mean, coding is like going to the gym, you know, it's like math, it's cumulative, it's not only a skill, it's a craft. And it's something that you need to cultivate every day, you need to do every day, you need to constantly be curious, constantly be learning. So as a technical founder, I totally agree with you on the offshoring part, you know.

Uh, especially when these bigger companies are set up in a way that, you know, there is a project manager that speaks good English, for example, and, or there might be even a U S based project manager. And that project manager is assigned your product in your case, along with who knows how many others, right? Maybe five, six, seven others. And behind him is a development team that is, that is offshore. So how the gap gets bridged between what you want, want, want to get done.

And, um, what actually gets done, uh, the kind of tools, the kind of infrastructure, the kind of quality to go, the kind of process that goes into building the software is, is, uh, I think it's a tough deal for any non -technical founder who wants to hire one of those guys and thinks that his app is just going to mushroom out of the clouds because that's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a lower probability strategy as you said. So.

Someone will just say you get what you pay for. And in many cases, I believe in this particular offshoring versus having really good on -prem or really good dedicated staff. It's 100 % true.

Well, the other thing is that you mentioned way at the beginning about patents, IP, and you've got to invest in people that are really close to you if you're expecting that the work they do is going to actually generate these great patents. And that's not something you can just expect an offshore team.

Mm -hmm.

to really create unless they're really working closely with the core team that's kind of got the whole architecture in mind and you know.

Well, absolutely. Two of our guys have had, they basically have equity in the company. So we kind of want to invest everyone in, you know, just, just, just make sure that everyone has, has a skin in the game and has, is, is, is working for a lot more than just receiving their paycheck, you know? So it's not easy to find guys like that. And one thing that I'm very grateful with is,

Yeah, good. Well, that's important.

We have created so much generic digital assets at this point that with the amount that know how that we have in our core group, it is that they're very easy to, it's very easy for us to maintain. Bringing a new guy in and having him look at, you know, five or six microservices, each of which comprise of over 200 ,000 lines of code, let's say, is not easy. There's a significant cost to training. There's a significant cost to, uh,

I mean, for the most part, everything we do is standardized, you know, in terms of how we code, in terms of how we ship, how we deploy. But no matter what, there is a significant learning curve there. So having someone who is motivated, not only financially, but also personally having a, having a, a, just a little bit extra guarantee there that your technology will be protected is, is paramount.

And if you can't, what we've learned to do is a lot of times we separate the front ends from the back ends. We have dedicated microservices and some people just, or some contractors, they just don't have access to that code base, which is, which embodies IP.

Yeah, yeah. Are you? What are you using for all this C sharp or Java or what?

Well, for the backend, we're predominantly using C Sharp. For pretty much everything runs in Azure. For the front end, we use the standard tools, which are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We've tried some frameworks before, and I'm not a super huge fan of frameworks. Most seasoned developers will disagree with me, but we kind of like to roll our own front end. So we use jQuery, AJAX, we use HTML, CSS.

and obviously some kind of a bootstrap framework for responsive design.

You have to be a serious glutton for punishment to use jQuery.

I know, but if you have eight to 10 years of experience in it, it becomes second nature and I have someone that is really good at it. So I'm very happy with that. I work mostly on the back end.

Just keep that person around because you can't afford to have two people that actually understand that weird stuff. So.

Well, it's amazing how quickly Gpt will read jQuery for you, by the way. I don't know if you've tried it, but if you try it, you will see it's a miracle. It's absolutely unbelievable.

Ah... No.

So you're probably wondering why do I even, why do I, why have I bumped into jQuery? Because I built my website for my nonprofit foundation using WordPress. And in order, and so you have to use PHP and, you know, obviously HTML and CSS on the front end. But in order to do some of these really tricky things, it's always, you know, you got to use jQuery.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Mm -hmm.

And I could stare at a jQuery for half a day and not fully understand it. Just...

This is not super intuitive syntax, I've got to give you that. But it's a tool of the trade. It's a tool of the trade.

Yeah, I know. I know. So last topic. I'm just so, you know, when anyone listens to your story, it's going to be obvious that you're a guy that's developed grit from early childhood practically. But what's your view on grit and startups and where it comes from and...

Just your, I love your thoughts on it. I try to ask everybody who's on this podcast the question.

Well, you know, looking at your, uh, Ted talk, looking at your Ted talk and, and having a glimpse of what you've had to overcome personally. And, you know, your, your life story, I have to tell you my story of grit or perseverance is, uh, uh, we'll be very humble compared to that. Um, and I guess it's the same for everything. You know, everyone, uh, what was the philosopher saying? You know, uh, be kind to everyone because everyone's going through a hard battle.

So I guess everybody's battle is hard in their own way, in their own perspective. But I always, knowing what I know, seeing what I've seen, I believe that there are stories of certain individuals, certain people that are pretty much untouchable. I mean, my story of grit is growing up in rural Africa, having to do military service in a country that was...

you know, was falling apart essentially at the time. You know, having to be a student athlete and be a professional athlete, even during high school, see in Europe you could do that. You know, so just essentially having to go through these, how can I say cycles to where you get something done and it's like, man, that's the hardest thing in my life I've ever done. I don't think anything harder is ever gonna, anything tougher is ever gonna happen to me. And...

And it's amazing how it does, you know, how there's always next level, next level, next level. So I can think of so many examples in, in my life or career where something felt tough and I literally just had to sit there and, and not run out of juice, not run out of grit, just, just basically just live through it. And the next door would open. So from there, you get this power and you're thinking, man, nothing can be harder than that. Right.

And all of a sudden here comes the next one and the next one. So, you know, from having to navigate, you know, many places that were not exactly very comfortable to live in, having to spend years of my life without parents, you know, having to be an athlete, having to be a soldier, having to be basically an immigrant, having to go down this road to where, you know, you, you have to earn everything with your own two hands. I wouldn't replace that for the world.

I wouldn't change that for the world. And you know, what fascinates me the most at this point, because my kids are young and they've chosen to be competitive athletes at a very young age. So this intangible, which is great. It's an absolute intangible. It's an absolute requisite for, I would say for pretty much anything you want to undertake in life. I don't care if you want to be a painter or a businessman or an athlete or a soldier. It really doesn't matter. I don't think you can.

You're always going to hit a wall. You're always going to hit the next step. And especially the closer you get to any place to where there's other human beings or somebody else who is just as good as what you do is as you are even better, maybe most times a lot better. So how to overcome that intimidation, how to overcome your inhibitions and how to make the best out of what you're given, not the next guy, you know, not the other good, but you how to work with what you've been given is.

is something that really preoccupies me now because I'm trying to obviously to get this business to work. I'm trying to get our shareholders to be happy and to be rewarded. And personally, to get my kids to grow up in a way that, you know, they can face the world, which is rapidly changing in many ways. And some of those ways seem very scary to me, but be able to, to have success and to hold their own in anything they want to undertake.

So, they're nine and a half and seven. So, yes, and they're both on traveling teams and they're playing. It's amazing how quickly it goes, but they're nine and a half and seven. They have plans, they have visions, they have goals, which is, you couldn't coach for that. You couldn't develop for that. You can encourage it.

How old are they now?

But it somehow comes from within and when that happens, all you can do is just feed it, empower it, empower it. So how that happens is how we feed their bodies, how we feed their minds, how we get theory to turn into practice, how we get them to perform under pressure, but at the same time be happy children. It's just preoccupies pretty much my entire existence. But as it should, and you know, and the principles of that are very similar to the principles how...

as it should.

even us as adults will accomplish everything else. I tell them a lot of time, you don't need to wait for five decades to be me. You can just learn it right now. So we're learning all the time. And again, a super long answer to your question. I don't believe that any undertaking can be done without character and without grit.

Hehehehe

Well, this answer was the most eloquent answer I could have ever asked for. That was a fabulous way to end this episode. I am so happy that I got to meet you and that you were willing to be on this podcast. What a pleasure. Thank you.

Uh, thank you. Thank you for having me and thank you for exposing me to, to your story as well. I think it's an incredible story. It makes my story very humble. Uh, if you want to know my true opinion, uh, I also write, I write from Galena right here to Carson city, uh, when the weather is nice. So, I mean, I put in 50 miles, uh, probably two, three times a week on a road bike, but, uh,

Watching you and what you do on your road bike, you know, that gives me a lot of fuel. It gives me a lot of motivation and Next time when I want to stop at the candy shop for a little water water I might, you know, take a shorter break than The than the than usual so I'm I'm very Thankful to you for that. I tried this once I've never tried it before we had two really cool people working for us at the time and they were generating this content when we're gonna post it on LinkedIn on our YouTube it was the

real life of a startup, right? So we did a few of these, we tried to do a few of these inhibited things to where we were capturing footage at work. And I watched it and I'm like, oh my God, this is the most boring thing I've ever seen. So it didn't quite turn out, you know, talking about accounting software and how we're going to sell it and putting that on YouTube. I don't think that that would have caught much fire. Anyways, but you know, I've never, I've never tried that since then. And.

Heheheheh

I hope this turns out good for you. And I'm just, again, very thankful that you had me on your show.

Well, thank you, Dimitri. And I will be giving you, when the book comes out, I'll be sending you an autographed copy of it, I promise. I might send along, so I wrote a children's book for four to nine year olds. I might have to send that too.

and I will read it.

Uh, please do because we're talking about these characters now, you know, my, my son wants to know who, who was better Pele or Kobe Bryant or Shaq or, so now we're modeling after these characters, but we're looking at their real life story. We're looking at their biography. You know, we're looking at all this content we put out, you know, I told them Kobe Bryant passed away, but he wrote these books. He actually did the same thing. He wrote children's books and more or less they were on this subject is, is great. So.

It would be awesome if I can share that with them because they're the future.

Yeah. Well, again, this was fantastic. And we're friends for life now.

I appreciate that. If you're coming to San Francisco or you're flying or you're flying through here, please let us know. Please let me know and vice versa. If there's anything that I can help you with, if there's any resource or anything else, just please feel free. Do not hesitate.

My son owns a, and his family owns a place in Incline Village, and they ski at North Star all the time.

Mm -hmm.

Great. Well, if they would like to ski at Squaw, we have a in -shop, it's in our family. So if they would like to ski Squaw, please let me know.

Well, I might like to ski squat.

That's just a few minutes down the road. Yes, it does. Yes, it does. And don't get me started on that.

has a new name.

Well, me neither, but I understand why they had to do it. And Pacific Palisades is a cool name.

Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Sure. Yes.

Well, the problem is that the Olympics were held there twice under the old name. And so that's a little confusing.

Yes, exactly.

It is, the fire burns there right in the corner.

All right, my friend. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it very much too, Jothi.

All right, bye for now.