Bio

David Urbanic has been fortunate to ride waves of tech innovation from developer tools and database systems to avatars and AI. He has worked in the trenches and the C-Suite and helped grow 10 startups, 4 of which he co-founded – the latest focused on conversational, symbolic, and transactional AI. Along the way he built the first customer service team at Netflix, launched some of the earliest VR/AR authoring tools, wrote imaging systems licensed to NASA and the Smithsonian, sold software in over 100 countries, and contributed to frameworks for AI ethics, governance, and policy. He is now CEO of Collectible Intelligence, reinventing trading markets with a platform that improves performance, collaboration, and trust by applying advanced imaging, AR, and AI.

Intro

David Urbanek joins Jothy Rosenberg to share his extensive journey through the tech industry, highlighting his experiences with startups and his passion for innovation, particularly in AI. Throughout the conversation, David emphasizes the importance of taking care of team members to ensure a strong product and customer satisfaction. The discussion delves into memorable moments from their shared history at Borland, including the unique culture that fostered loyalty and collaboration among team members. David also reflects on the challenges he faced and how grit, shaped by his upbringing and the people around him, has been crucial to his success. The episode ultimately reveals the transformative power of teamwork, resilience, and the continuous drive for improvement in the fast-paced world of technology.

Story

David Urbanic, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and innovator, shares his extensive journey through the world of technology and startups with host Jothy Rosenberg. The conversation begins with Urbanic's deep-rooted experience in various tech sectors, including his pivotal role in launching customer service at Netflix and developing early VR and AR tools. Urbanic's narrative is rich with anecdotes that reflect on the evolution of technology and the lessons learned from his roles across multiple startups, including his current venture, Collectible Intelligence. He emphasizes the importance of collaboration, trust, and innovation in creating successful teams, illustrating how a supportive environment can lead to exceptional product development and customer satisfaction.

The discussion takes an engaging turn as Urbanic recounts his unique experiences, such as the challenges he faced while presenting at high-stakes events, including moments of technological failure that tested his resilience. He reflects on the significance of creating a culture of open communication and teamwork, which he believes is essential for any organization to thrive. Urbanic's insights into customer-centric approaches and the need for ethical considerations in tech development highlight the responsibility that innovators carry in shaping the future of the industry. His stories serve as invaluable lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs navigating the complexities of the tech landscape today.

Takeaways

• David Urbanic has a rich history in technology, contributing to startups and innovations in AI.
• The importance of teamwork and communication is emphasized through personal experiences in startups.
• David's journey from tech support at Borland to founding multiple startups showcases adaptability.
• Building strong relationships with customers and colleagues is crucial for successful product development.
• David's insights on AI highlight its potential to democratize access to technology and data.
• Humor and resilience in challenging situations can foster a positive work environment.

Foreign.

Rosenberg, the host of Designing Successful Startups, where today's guest is David Urbanek.

I stood up there, we had a great Gambit where my CEO stepped up and did a couple of PowerPoint slides, which is forbidden. Everybody groaned. Then she hands off to me, her tech guy, and I start up with a PowerPoint slide and everybody groans.

Then I zoom backwards out of it, out of the office, down the hallway, I pivot in 3D, I click the rearview mirror and I'm in a different space and it's all this 3D cool imaging stuff, right? And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then my laptop shuts down and I'm like, right.

David Urbanek has been fortunate to ride waves of tech innovation, from developer tools and database systems to avatars and AI. He has worked in the trenches and the C suite and helped grow 10 startups, four of which he co founded.

The latest focused on conversational, symbolic and transactional AI.

Along the way, he built the first customer service team at Netflix, launched some of the earliest VR AR authoring tools, wrote imaging systems licensed to NASA and the Smithsonian, sold software in over 100 countries, and contributed to frameworks for ethics, governance and policy.

He is now CEO of Collectible Intelligence, reinventing trading markets with a platform that improves performance, collaboration and trust by applying advanced imaging, AR and AI. Welcome to the show, David. Good to see you.

Great to see you.

Well, thanks for doing this. You're a very good old friend. We've known each other a long time.

We have survived a lot of situations you got us into.

Oh, no, you're going to start with that. Okay. Before you do, though, I like to set context. Where are you originally from and where do you live now?

Originally born in the center of California in a little place called Dos palace that I always was palace, but it's P A L O S. But I grew up in Aptos, California. You know, up between San Francisco and Monterey. For people who don't know, I currently live in Carmel, California.

Okay, the thing about. I didn't know that you grew up in Aptos. You know, there's a funny microclimate in Aptos. That is the. It's this.

It's the foggiest place along the whole coast.

Yeah, we used to have a fog fest for a while.

So you grew up in the dark, basically.

No, no, no, no, no. See, the fog goes away around 11am it's mostly in the summer. It just keeps the tourists away. They all go to Capitol and stop. It's all secret.

Oh, are you recording this?

So Carmel is a beautiful town. That's a good choice.

I've really enjoyed it. I came here because my grandson goes to school here. He's in Stevenson High school, private school, really great grade school.

Are you working completely remote?

I guess so, yeah. But, I mean, it's been, I don't know, 20, 30 years since I've really had an office, a cubicle.

Well, the number you quoted for me was another number, but I don't mean it's the same thing, but 35 years in tech, which is the exact same number of years I've been doing startups.

Right? Yeah, I, I got my degree in public policy, Then I went to work in government for a little while and it was. It was crazy.

And Borland was right over the hill. Both my sisters, one worked there before me, one worked there after me, and I just thought, I can do this.

I had a little bit of tech background and started in tech support. Spent seven years there when my daughter was young and really learned to think about the customer.

You don't know this, but you're part of the reason that I went to Borland. But I didn't know you were there. But, but here's the short story, is that I had done a startup. Remember that?

Back then, of course, we didn't have the Internet to do updates to software. If you wanted to update somebody, somebody's software, you sent them floppies.

I remember Wolf C had like 70 floppies at one point or something.

I know it was, it was a. A suitcase. A suitcase of floppies.

Well, I was very frustrated with how many times we were having to send all hundred of our customers updates because we were. We were riddled with bugs, frankly. And I started to ask everybody around, I want to learn how the best quality software today is built.

And they said, oh, well, there's only one place to consider, and it's right in your backyard, and it's Ballin.

Wow. You know, the culture there was fantastic. I've never found anything like it, especially.

For a big company. You're right. I agree. I learned so much there, so I didn't know anybody there. And I literally just went over and.

And went to the front desk and I said, I want a job here. It got me me the job.

Wow.

And.

And then it wasn't for another probably year or so, maybe two, before I found out what you did down in the bowels of the company, you know, in the, in the basement where, you know, they shovel the coal into the steam engines.

I personally, over seven years, took between 70, 60, 70, 80,000 phone calls myself and, and all that other stuff. And I moved up the ranks, but I learned from the greatest mentors, yourself included.

So just to, you know, sort of finish the story about the quality it was, it started with you guys, of course, talking to customers, answering their questions, fixing bugs, when it was truly a bug they were calling about. And then this whole idea that there was this group of very loyal customers that we named Team B that helped other customers.

But, you know, here was a company that had a Software product with 2 million customers and they were the toughest customers you could have because they themselves were developers and they could see why this thing broke. Just whatever what it was, they did.

And it wasn't sort of some mystery, you know, like I think I might have accidentally crossed my arms when I typed and that. And so but then where I was, which was part of the, you know, development team, I had both developers and qa. That was one of the things that was.

Turned out to be unusual in many other places.

And when they, when, when they were going to ship a product, they started to have, they would have an alpha, then they would have beta one, beta two, beta three, gamma one, gamma two, gamma three, bug hunts. I mean, all the things that, that we did and it, and it was just great stuff and the customers were so loyal and they just loved it.

And then, then the story of. And I'm talking more than I usually do on an episode, but, but this is.

I'm interviewing you, but, but there.

And I'm going to shut up after this next part. But, but there was really something amazing that happened when the company was having a little bit of financial trouble. The.

They fired the original founder from being the CEO. Philippe Kahn was, was out the door and the CFO was now the CEO. And then he missed another quarter.

So Philippe was fired because I think three quarters in a row they missed their numbers. Sock was, was taking a tumble.

And so one of the things that, you know, in one of our meetings was sort of around the table and you had Paul Gross at one point and me at another point, and then you had Gary Wizen was the third person. So Paul was the boss of my group and Gary Wizen's group. And then the fourth person in the room was this was the CEO Gary Wetzel.

What Gary said next at the beginning of the meeting was a little ironic given that he was talking to three Jews. He said, this is a come to Jesus. Meeting gentlemen.

And what he was about to tell us was that one of us, Gary Wisen or I had to ship within the quarter or Gary Wetzel, now the CEO, would be fired because we had to ship to make enough money to finally make a quarter profitable. And we all looked at each other and said, but the, these are not ready. I mean, Gary was further behind than me, but we were not even to a Gamma.

Was this C 5.055. 5.0. Yeah, baby. That was tough.

And you didn't know this. You didn't know this train wreck was coming yet.

No, no, no.

But, but what happened was that basically everybody turned their evil gazes on me and said, you have to do it. And I said, I just want you all to realize that we have never screwed our customers.

We're about to screw them because we will not ship a quality product. We will not ship a product anywhere close to what they expect and have learned to expect for years from Borland.

And we might piss them off so much that we lose them forever. And they said, can't be helped. You have to do it. When I left that meeting, I, I came down to talk to you.

Yes, you did. I remember that. And I said, you can't do this. And I have sign off, which was ludicrous because here's this tech support guy.

But you said, what do you need me to do? And you, I mean, that was sincere. I could feel it. So I said, I need your guys downstairs. You can't, you can't go on vacation after you ship.

We're going to be having install bugs. This is going to be doom. And the only way we're going to do it is we double our staffing with people who know what they're doing.

And you said, my people will be downstairs helping you every single day. And you did it. And that, that was the Hill Street Blues.

Well, that's the last part.

So basically I was trying to motivate the engineering team because they, they, they, you know, they didn't choose a job where they have to talk to people right very much. And, but I said, look, none of us want to ship a product that's buggy.

But, but we can't just voice this on the people in tech support and expect them to handle this. They're going to be, some of these are going to be complicated bugs. We haven't gotten rid of the level 1 bugs.

There are going to be crash bugs and they're going to be hard to figure out. And tech support is not equipped to handle level One bugs. So we got to do something for them. And I. And I had this flash where I.

I said, you know, I feel like I'm the bald guy on Hill Street Blues, the tall guy. And he says, look, there's a carjacking. There's a rape, There's a murder.

There's, you know, and you're going to deal with this, and you're going to deal with that, and. And you're going to deal with the third thing and be safe out there. Yeah, yeah, be safe out there. And so. And so.

And so when I talked to you about all this, you said, oh, okay, I'm going to shave my head and be like that guy. And I thought about, should I shave my head? I didn't even recognize you the next day when you had done that.

I pulled up the parking garage under the building. I drove up slowly next to you. I said, hey, Jonathi. And you went like this.

Now, for the people, there's a lot of people that are not seeing the video. So your face looked like some sort of a. I don't know, like one of the fish in Finding Nemo, you know. So I.

Yes, you were. Genuinely didn't recognize me. And then shock. And I just drove away and parked. It was great timing. I was so fortunate.

I did learn a lot about how to. How to build great software, and I also learned a lot about teams. And one of the things that.

That you have highlighted and sort of your base of knowledge that you've built up over this, your 35 years, is a lot about teams. And so tell me what you. Besides the Borland experience, what sort of things or places that you've cut your teeth and.

And a, you know, like a formative experience or.

Well, you know, I will. I will begin where you left off. The interesting thing was I had a lot of questions from my team about whether I was well or not that day.

And the next day, five of my team employees came in with shaved heads. And one of them that day said, fine, I'm in. And that was Daniel Thomas, who worked for me, who ended up taking over my spot when I left.

And he had ponytail halfway down his back, and he let his team shave his head. And then I had Paul Gross come in and say, we're worried there's a cult in the hallway. He was like, we hear there's a cult in Dex.

The developer support what's going on. But what it taught me was, you know, the pizza nights that your team helping our team. The fun code guard was the spandex story with this dressing up.

There were so many moments where we, we came together because we treated each other as people.

And so that was the very first time I thought about management from a non academic perspective, not a, and a non like get through the day perspective. And I thought, you know what, if you take care of your people, they take care of the product and the product takes care of your customer.

And there's, there's no substitute for a good product for the customer because all developer support can do is patch and, and hope to fix. And there's a promise that they, it's workarounds. Right. So you take care of those people first. Company after company and startup after startup.

You've got me beat on that count. I'm on my 10th right now.

No, I've only got nine.

Oh. You know, I haven't had two successful exits like you.

I've had one that lasted 25 years and sold to company Zumify, the imaging company, sold to Oxford, Cambridge, the Getty Smith Museums. So I had a lot long lasting and the big win of course was Netflix where I was employee 31. And so I've had a few successes, but I think you've run.

That's why you can live in Carmel.

And you know, you came in on a level that's way above where I was. You were working on debugger tools and I was in tech support, learning about, you know, Sidekick, the business assistant.

Yeah, I don't, you know, I never did view it as levels. I'll never forget when I, when I went from being CTO at a company and they essentially the board fired the CEO because he mismanaged money.

And they came to me and said, tag, you're it. And I said, I don't want to be it. And they said, either do it or we're shutting the company down tomorrow.

Wow.

And I made the wrong decision and, and gave in to them. And that wasn't the right decision. And so I did it, but it was suddenly people wouldn't talk to me as much. Suddenly I couldn't confide in people.

They moved me from my cube, which I said, no, no, no, I don't want to move. They said, you're having conversations about things other people cannot hear. We are making you move.

Get in your chair, we'll wheel you down to this closed office. And I hated that. I hated that.

And when, when I started a, you know, so after that, when I started a startup from scratch, I'm sure I did what you did, which is, it's a Flat structure. We're communicating all the time. And I have a different job than they do, but it's not a better job, you know?

You know, I take your point.

When I moved up at Borland from newbie support guy to facilitator supervisor to manager of a big team with five supervisors to product management, product marketing, you know, I was very fortunate because I had people come to me and they'd say, that was a great meeting. Nobody mentioned this. And they'd want me to know what they knew because they knew that I got it and I'd suffered in the trenches.

And so I could go to them, conversely, and I could say, what are the. We're going to ship this. Why is that a bad decision? Or how does it need to change?

And so I was able to maintain that somewhat flat feeling, even if there was a hierarchy officially.

Right.

And so I value what you're saying.

But the real key to my success is muffins.

That's funny. The muffins were good. I always suspected that you were actually making them.

I always did make them.

At first I just thought, you know, it could be. It could be your wife. And then I thought, no, he's taking way too much interest in this.

But the reason. The reason that I think they were not just this, you know, cutesy thing is that, you know, there's this thing about people eating together.

I don't know quite exactly what it is, but it's very social, even if you're not sitting at a table across from each other. But there's just something about it. And so I always combined that with sort of a. An important weekly communication meeting. You know, for most of.

Most of my, you know, recent life, that was, you know, an all company meeting when we still had an office. Because it's really hard when I say, okay, guys, but I get on a Zoom call. Okay, guys, here are the muffins, right?

But how do they look?

And here's my address if you want to drive by.

I always loved your meetings because of that feeling of camaraderie. It was visceral. I've tried to capture that. I just actually had a discussion with the CTO and founder of the company. I'm this my startup right now.

I won't name him and I won't say his current place. He's. He's still working somewhere else, so. But fantastic guy, brilliant guy.

Brilliant.

Big name in certain fields. But I told him, look, we're going to go to trade shows and we're going to build relationships with customers. We're going to have a team.

I explained, team Borland, Team B, and he said, brilliant. We'll co opt them, we'll get him in deep, move them from to showcase accounts. He's been at many companies, so he knows the drill.

And I said, you're coming to the trade shows because those moments after the show in the evening when you go out and eat, or those moments when you step aside with a customer, it's that shared, physical, visceral time when I think you really build relationships.

Although I hate, I hate shows. But I, I, I get it and I've done, I've done my share of them. But. Hi.

The podcast you are listening to is a companion to my recent book, Tech startup Toolkit how to Launch Strong and Exit Big. This is the book I wish I'd had. As I was founding and running eight startups over 35 years.

I tell the unvarnished truth about what went right and especially about what went wrong. You could get it from all the usual booksellers.

I hope you like it.

It's a true labor of love. Now back to the show.

You know, I think a lot of it has to do with, for me, the initial experiences going to Borcon, the Borland developer conference, and seeing you line your entire team up in the front of the room and then looking out at an audience of hundreds of developers and saying, go, what's your question? And the guy would say, when I do this in the debugger, this happens and it shouldn't because of this.

And then you point to somebody, you say, so and so it's you. And he'd step forward, you know, an engineer who doesn't want to talk to people, and he'd say, oh, well, because this, that and the other.

But if you do this, that and the other, and we'll get on that right away.

And it was like this, it was like a, like the gods come down from on high and talk to the mortals and the mortals show real power, like they're actually demigods. And I just reveled in it because, you know, I'm not a trained engineer.

I've written tens of thousands of line of code, but it's JavaScript, it's not C, you know, and so I watched these geniuses interact. It was amazing to me. And so that's the way I experienced the trade show.

Yeah, well, that was pretty Impressive that you could get. It's because they were both developers, the person with the issue and the person who's got a respond to them.

I think it's harder if you're, let's say you're a fintech company and so you've got some sort of financial services person who's not necessarily very technical. They know their area of specialty now they're using your product and they might have done something a little unusual.

It still shouldn't be a bug and break. But then it takes to explain to them what happened and how you're going to fix it. It takes more patience, more understanding.

Because if you're, if you come at them like, you know, a, you know, a level three engineer, they're not going to understand a word you say.

Right, right, right. You know, on that topic, back to the Borland days when you guys came downstairs.

I remember one day you came down and you were talking, you were sitting in on calls. Afterwards, you came by my little office and said, you know, I just sat in a call, three calls in a row.

Guy answered questions about serious bugs in our DOS product, our OS 2 product, our Windows product. Who are these people? And I just realized there's so much talent, you know, and there's so much investment.

And we had 80, had 81% attrition over 18 months, right when that was happening and Microsoft started hiring everybody, luckily you hired a lot of my people, you know, into R and D and into qa. And so we kept that talent. You know, it's sort of like, if you love your talent, let it go. You know.

And I remember a lot of discussions with my team saying, you can't leave this week or you're screwing him. Him and her. Can you stay a month? Well, is the position going to go away? And I'd be like, I'm talking to the people upstairs.

They value you, will make something happen and they would stay in spite of a better pay, somewhere else. I don't know, I, I really love those moments.

Well, moving to more recent time, talk to me about your obsession with AI. Way before everybody else in the world was obsessed with AI, you've done what, six something like AI startups?

Yeah, yeah. You know, so there's so many different kinds of AI. Right.

But so for me, when I was at Borland, I checked out A bunch of database products out of the dev support library. We used to do product swaps. We'll give you Borland people, you give us your product, and we'd have something cool in the library, right?

Well, I started checking these out, and I went and applied for a job at UC University of California. And for a year, I was a database designer, level two for the humanities division at UC Santa Cruz.

And I learned about data normalization, all kinds of great things. But I walked into the interview having read several different product manuals, because that's what you do in tech support.

I used to get told I did dead products for a while. And so I'd have the guy, a manager, come in to me and say, we need to support this product on Monday.

And I'd say, it's Friday, and you've got thousands of customers who are going to know a lot more than me. And on Monday, I'd handle it, right? Because, you know, you learn how to. What's supposed to happen, what's likely the problem.

Anyway, so I went to this interview. I borrowed my friend's glasses, very thick glasses. I didn't shave because it's ucsc, right? And I wanted to fit in.

And I talked about what I knew about the product. So I got the job. And then I was like, oh, my gosh, the very first day, my boss starts asking me questions. I didn't know what he was asking.

So I run over to the science library, and I'm flipping through magazines and books because, you know, Internet was not really a thing. Database design led me to data organization led me to interface design. And from that, I went to vrar. I came back to Borland, right?

Did a bunch of Borland tools, fantastic UI and user experience. And then I went to my first startup, which was Live Picture with John Scully, right? I leave my team, I drive across the freeway.

I go to that Shell station. I go in the bathroom, I try to put on my suit without stepping in something. I go to this little building.

I walk in the lobby, I look through this window, and there's a meeting. And a guy comes out and says, can I help you? And it's John Scully. And he had just left Apple and Pepsi.

And I'm like, I'm here for an interview, and I'm taking whatever you offer me. You know, I got to do all kinds of demos with him. Fantastic. I can tell you all about him, but.

But there I learned about VR, AR, and interface design, right? So it's interface, interface, interface. Then we did imaging interface, and I Keep thinking, what's the best interface of all?

Well, natural language is great, but an intelligent interface is even better. And how do you get to that and are we there yet? And I thought there's time enough for me to learn and then boom, everything happens.

But I did voice AI, I did conversational AI, I did linguistic based symbolic AI, and then the, you know, the Tensor based large language models hit and it was suddenly like you could talk to these systems. And so for me it's interface, it's, it's, it's, it's access for everybody to big data and huge processing power. It's enabling, it's democratizing.

It's amazing to me that that's why.

So I don't think I'm using it nearly as extensively as I could, but I'm using it quite a bit.

My favorite use, which is prospecting, it's looking at a bunch of stuff and pulling out.

It's, it's analysis light, it's summarization light, it's composition light, but it's about finding key points and if you iterate, it's, it's just amazingly powerful.

Two years ago, I'm sitting in my living room with my grandson who's, he's 14 now, so he's about 12, and we're talking about AI because I'm doing it and he's once, you know, he's a curious guy. And I said, well, you're a gamer, right? He plays Fortnite and he's good. I say what are the top three things for good gaming, right?

And he says it's, you know, aim and it's situational awareness or something and it's something else. And he just, it's like off the top of my head because he's thought about these things.

He's, he's very conceptual and I say, okay, ask, you know, download ChatGPT or boom, ask it. And he's, I don't remember. He was on his phone or I probably on his laptop. Ask the same question. He says, what do you mean? I said type it in.

So he types it in and it comes back with two pages that are exactly those points. Incredibly well written. Right.

Actually have just two more questions and they're going to be related. One is, and we've both done too many startups, that's, that's actually the correct number. You don't, don't quote like 10 or 9. It's just too many.

Agreed.

Okay, so what kind of people do this? What's wrong with us?

People who see a Better way, want to move a little faster. You think? What do you think?

Well, I think it, I think it's that we've all experienced big companies, even a really good one like Borland, that moved amazingly fast. There's still built in inertia just based on its size. Right. And so any big company is going to move slower.

Big companies can't afford to take risks and so they, they won't take the risks getting back to the people as opposed to thinking of a startup as an entity, but just the, like the founder or the founders.

It's, I think it's people that think they have ideas and who knows where the ideas come from but they got there somehow that can change the world and they feel compelled to do something about it. And to do something about it requires almost always creating a company because you can't do it alone.

There's a lot of people who talk about disruption. I like to think in terms of reinvention. You know, it's like disruption without the friction.

And the people I'm starting this collectible intelligence with this latest startup have a vision. It's great to find a market that's a test bed for innovation.

And so if you have sufficiently narrow scope but a sufficiently big opportunity and they are tech friendly and not too bug averse or feature limitation averse, then you can do amazing things and move improve rapidly their experience what you're doing.

And so I've got these, this team of people around me who, who want to take AI and other advanced technologies that I won't talk about and address some of the limitations, some of the adoption blocks that we're seeing and work through some of the challenges and do it with an audience that is desperately wanting improvements in their experience and ready for the challenges of a new tech. And so that's their, their mental set is I know who can use this. We can give them something useful. They're okay if it's not perfect. Let's go.

Yep, I agree with all that. All right, so now to just take it one step further and, but going to make it a little bit more personal about you.

So we, we all know you, you and I know very well that you can't do this. No one seems to do this who doesn't have a lot of grit.

And besides what happened to you when we were whitewater rafting together, what else has given you your grit?

Oh, you know, my dad was very much a get her done kind of guy. Like and my mom was very much a, is very much a. You can do Anything you set your mind and heart to, David.

The combination of those two, I think, put me on a path of like, overconfidence and persistence or endurance. Right?

So grit, I think, though, grit, fundamentally, it's been about being surrounded by great people and at the right moment, not saying, what a debacle, but saying, this is a glorious fail. We're going down big, you know, I mean, I've been sued for millions of dollars internationally, you know, I've had seven different.

Personally, as a company, personally, for 10, for millions of dollars in Canada of all places. I've had seven different demos in a row at different trade shows. Fail.

I've been at, if you remember, Demo at capital Ds, capital E, emo at Palm Desert. I stood up there. We had a great Gambit where my CEO stepped up and did a couple of PowerPoint slides, which is forbidden. Everybody groaned.

Then she hands off to me, her tech guy, and I start up with a PowerPoint slide and everybody groans. Then I zoom backwards out of it, out of the office, down the hallway. I pivot in 3D, I click the rear view mirror and I'm in a different space.

And it's all this 3D cool imaging stuff, right? And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then my laptop shuts down and I'm like, right.

So I slide over this other laptop, which isn't even set up, and I say, one moment. Everybody's going, yeah, survive that, right? Type, type, type, type, type.

And so I've had these positive experiences, and I think it's like toddlers, you know, too big a fall, you stop crawling for a little while.

But if you just have the right challenges along the way and you're surrounded by the right resources and people, it becomes a positive thing and you grow. So maybe that's it. That's my story. Anyway.

Well, since I broached the topic, just quickly let's end with the whitewater rafting story, okay?

Give me nightmares. Okay, so I'll tell my side of it and then you can fill in where you want to. Hey, David, how'd you like to go white rough water rafting again?

We're going to go to an even harder set of rapids. It's going to be Class 5. It's a number to you, but I know what it means. It's going to be great.

Oh, and we're going to do it when we're having the biggest runoff ever. And the water will kill you in 30 seconds because it's ice cold. It's amazing. It's even a liquid.

And I say, sure, Jyothi, because I really want to stay up there on your team in your good graces. And you say, well, get in this boat with these other novices. We paddle downward. And the guy says, make sure we don't hit that rock over there.

And the next thing you know, my friends and I are swimming three Class 5 rapids in a row. When we come up, the guide looks worried. People are yelling, get away from the boat. Get away from the boat.

And the next day, I'm literally afraid to get back in the boat. I literally felt fear for first. I mean, I don't feel fear, you know, talking in front of people.

I don't like spiders, but I was like, oh, my gosh, you know, and there was one moment the next day when we were going down a gentle thing and there was one little ripple and I jumped towards the middle of the boat and everybody looked at me like I was nuts. But then we got to that moment where there was this place called Coffin Rock. Do you remember that?

Yes. It was right in front of Freight Train. Freight Train. And Coffin Rock was part of. On the edge of Freight Train, that one.

They said, there is no swimming through this one.

And they said, we're normally going to go. We normally go left, but we're going to try to get past this rock and go right. This is after they huddle for 20 minutes. Right.

And you said, there's no shame if you want to get out of the boat and we'll find a way out of the ravine for you. And I said, well, I can't get out. I'm just going to see what happens to myself. That was scary. Were you scared?

I think everybody's boat flipped. I mean, mine did.

Yeah.

Yeah, everybody's boat flipped.

Were you scared? Well, I did.

I definitely was quite. Quite a bit. So because they'd said if you fall, the rapids that you're referring to, where we all flipped is called Last Chance.

Right.

And it's called that because below it is Freight Train, which the reason no one can swim through it is because the water is bubbling so much and for so long because it's like 100 yards long that you can't get up to get air because the water is just froth. It'd be like you're surfing and you're riding in the white part of the wave coming down and you can't get away from it.

Whereas in surfing, you can get away from it. You just dive down and let the wave go over you. But this is you're floating through it anyway. You can't breathe.

So I was thinking about that completely.

While we were going one of those debacle days.

The last thought I had was about the morning and how I'm glad I did what I did, which was to arrange for you to have a wake up call in your cabin at 4am and Joe Nuxel and I, you remember Joe, we, we were sitting outside listening to all the confusion and then there was a lot of.

Well, that was, that was, those were interesting times.

That was the most whitewater rafting I'd ever done, you know, because we sort of had this group and we kept wanting to go up and do more and more since then. I've done, you know, I've, I've done a little trip here and a little trip there.

But you know, we were going out, you know, every month, you know, your crew is solid.

The time that I was in a different boat watching your crew execute, it was impressive.

We got used to each other. That's, that's sort of what happens when you're a, you know, a team. It's like a front line of a, you know, of a football team.

They all know what everybody's doing and they, they, they, they're a, a unit, you know, a force.

And it's, you know, just a fantastic experience. I really appreciate you bringing me along in spite of the swimming.

Yeah, well, it was cold swimming, that's for sure.

It was cold.

Well, thanks for doing this, Dave. It's great to reminisce a little bit and hopefully we've added some good value to the people listening.

I hope there's a few insights in some of this. I've enjoyed interviewing you. It's been mutual. Well, thank you.

Thanks for tuning in the show notes contain useful resources and links and please follow and rate us at podchaser. Com. Designly successful startups and share and like us on your social media channels. Please. This is Jothi Rosenberg saying ttfn ta TA for now.