Neil Patel

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Jason Smith has now launched at least five startups. He successfully exited his first. Which has propelled him through to his latest venture which has attracted significant funding to help businesses operate at their best in their competitive landscape. The company, Klue has successfully gained financing from top-tier investors like Salesforce Ventures, Tiger Global Management, BDC Venture Capital, and Rhino Ventures.

In this episode, you will learn:

  • How to pick your cofounder
  • Pitching investors
  • How competition data can be so impactful for your business
  • Jason Smith’s top tips when launching a startup

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For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) that I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash.

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Moreover, I also provided a commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400 million (see it here).

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About Jason Smith:

Jason Smith is a sales and marketing-centric business guy. He is the co-founder, investor, and/or early employee of four start-ups (two successes, one still grinding, and one non-starter). Jason is the advisor and consultant to early-stage companies and has completed a stint as a VP at Electronic Arts.

Jason has led product development teams, services teams, sales teams, and marketing teams ranging in size from a few rockstars to hundreds of employees. And, he has been highly successful in attracting/picking/growing talent.

Jason has a track record of shaping rough ideas/initiatives into successful ventures. He has held key roles including President, Vision Critical, a global market research software leader, and co-founder of Columbus Group, a digital agency pioneer acquired by TELUS (NYSE: TU).

In 2011, at 40, Jason and his wife hit the reset button, bought 4 round-the-world plane tickets, and traveled the world for a year with their kids. Check out the YT video @ youtube.com/onemoresmith. Jason is now incubating two start-ups and advising early-stage companies like Strutta and Mobify.

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Connect with Jason Smith:

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Hey, guys. Today’s episode is brought to you by Zencastr. I remember back in the day when I was looking at putting together Zencastr. I was looking for a solution that would help me in putting things together. Essentially, this is what allowed me to bring DealMakers to life. Basically, Zencastr, what it is is an all-in-one solution where you just send a link to the person that you’re looking to interview. They would plug in their computer with their video, with the audio, and then you are good to go. You would piece everything together, give it to your audio engineer or even edit it yourself, and you are off to the races. Now, if you’re looking at getting into podcasting, you should definitely check Zencastr out, and you could also get a 30% discount, and this is the discount code that you will be able to redeem by going to Zen.ai/dealmakers0. Lastly, I was very much blown away when I found out that investing in wine has been one of the best-kept secrets amongst the wealthy. This is now not the case anymore. I came across this solution, which is called VinoVest, and they are a great solution that allows you to diversify investing by implementing or including wines into your portfolio. Take a look at this: wine has one-third of the volatility of the stock market, and yet it has outperformed the global equities market over the past 30 years with 10.6% annualized revenues. It’s a really good way to diversify your portfolio, and you could also get two months of free investing by just going to Zen.ai/dealmakers, and by going there, you will be able to redeem your discount.
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Alejandro: Alright, hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show. So I am very excited about the founder that we have today with us because he has been around the block quite a few times I think that we’re gonna be learning quite a bit on finding the right partner on. Thinking about fundraising thinking about the market building scaling financing exiting I mean all the above. So I guess without farther ado let’s welcome our guests today Jason Smith welcome to the show.

Jason Smith: Ah, Handra nice to be here.

Alejandro: So Json let’s do our little of a walkthrough memory lane. So how was life growing up in Toronto.

Jason Smith: Ah, it was good until I left and went to Vancouver and then it got even better.

Alejandro: So ah, that’s amazing like what? what? what? What’s the difference really between Vancouver and and Toronto

Jason Smith: You know I love toronto so canadian born and bred and grew up in Toronto. Loved the city. It’s an amazing city vibrant tech scene there. But when you’re an outdoors person and you get a taste of what Vancouver can be like with the mountains in the ocean. And no snow in the winter in the pacific northwest joy. It’s it’s hard to get back to toronto so what lured me to Vancouver was university I came out here for my undergrad in business at ubc and then when we finished that we decided to start a company because if you. Didn’t start a company at that time you were lured back to Toronto where most of the jobs were or the bay area where most of the jobs were in tech so we ended up starting a company and that that entitled me to stay in Vancouver which is it’s just a fantastic place to live.

Alejandro: And at this time I mean it was really the early days of the internet so you got the netscapes of the world. So I mean what? Ah what a time to be alive. No so how was how was it to be you know in the middle of everything.

Jason Smith: You know it was it. Yeah I’m certainly dating myself here I don’t know how many of your listeners are actually going to remember Netscape but that was that was the cold hard reality when you were kind of I was geeky enough. My friend was even geekier that we played in multi-user dungeons and had some exposure to the early internet and. Absolutely in awe. The fact that I could talk to what I thought was a swedish girl maybe on a chat forum and back in the day and it was probably a dude now that I now that I know what the internet was about but it was it was it was just enlightening to be able to do something like that and so. Awe of what the internet could be and as the web kind of emerged and Netscape came online and internet explorer in the battles. We thought we need to be and we need to be in this and so we decided to start a company did all the wrong things you know I started with 2 my best friends we had no money we put $5000 into a pot bought a couple old macs. And put a shingle and said let’s see if we could build a at the time a services business and not knowing that you weren’t supposed to go into business with your friend and and not not do it without any money. Yeah worked out. It worked out. Yeah.

Alejandro: But hey you know first company first exit. No. So not Bad. So So so how was that exit like I mean what the I’m sure that going through the acquisition process gave you to a certain degree The the visibility to the full cycle into the fact that it’s possible and that you can do it. So what? How? How would you say you know that that process and that experience was for you. So.

Jason Smith: Actually it’s a great point on the psychology of it. So when you don’t know better. It’s an advantage some level of navite helps so we came out and just said let’s just go talk to folks about this thing called the web and people needed. The time websites like literally massive companies like Verizon didn’t have a website so we were in those early days of pitching people to say we could build that for you and when you don’t know better you call into vps and tell them even though you were 21 that you knew and understood the web and they were old and they didn’t. And um, it worked and 1 thing led to another you get 1 break of a client I mean you know there there was all the hardships in the beginning like we went through six months with no business. Nobody would listen to us and then all of a sudden month seven you get a client that’s a big one that leads to the next client that leads the next client and ultimately it turned into a hundred person company. Then gave me the confidence to believe that you could do and build a business so rightly or wrongly I came out of that experience exiting to a large telco in Canada called tal is that you could build a business and you could do it on a bootstrap. Way and actually create quite an impact and a lot of it was just heads down crank and not knowing any better that you weren’t supposed to do. It was somewhat helpful.

Alejandro: Now in this case I mean the exit was in the double digit millions. But but but for you what it led was to another experience. You know your your second row I mean as they say a once an entrepreneur always an entrepreneur so on the first thing go around. You had the opportunity of really tasting success and on the second time around you know you had the opportunity of tasting learning. So why? So how was the second go out, go at it. Ah.

Jason Smith: If by learning alejandra you mean humbled? Yes I definitely tasted humble pie. Yeah, you come out of your first one and it and it worked right and so you don’t know any better than than it worked and so like here we are in our 20 s we had millions of dollars we thought we were really smart. And that we’d figured something out and then you recognize a lot of it. There’s a lot of luck and there’s a lot of timing and there’s a lot of things that need to come together that frankly are out of your control to make your business work and I didn’t know that going into it. The second business was. Instead of 2 of my university buddies. It was a couple Hbs grads so it was Bay Area based we were this is dotcom era we were pitching for you know $20000000 on the back of a powerpoint leveraging their harvard mafia connections to try and get all the right vc introductions and it was it was group buying on the internet. So it was back in the days where we thought everybody wants to buy I don’t know that chair that you’re sitting in every day we we could find 50 of us to go convince a supplier to sell us that chair for maybe ten twenty percent off group buying that was the concept. Um, but it was back in the days pre-social graph and when you try something before the market is ready. You are humbled by the reality of timing the market. In this case, there was no social. It was all email to convince people to sign up to join and group buy something. And that was just a very ineffective way of doing it. We also you know picked the wrong categories. There was tons of execution challenges but compared to Groupon who came along later and said let’s focus on nail salons not on chairs or electronics. Let’s not compete with Amazon and Walmart there. Let’s find the services pieces and give those those small retailers an outlet. To be able to provide discounts and people can group by that they crushed it like Groupon was one of the fastest growing companies of all time and they did alongside the social graph. So despite being kind of in awe of what you know a harvard mafia connection could get you in forms of introductions absolutely humbled by the reality of missing timing. And some execution but missing timing very much in the market when you’re too early no matter what you do You’re going to miss it if you’re too late no matter what you do You’re going to miss it. So there’s there’s an opportune time with market forces that you need to get into something.

Alejandro: Now obviously dealing everyone talks about dealing with success and how great it is but not a lot of people. You know, really are able to open up about you know, dealing with with a turnout of events that they was completely unexpected So in your case I mean you went From. You know, really hitting it out of the park on the previous company and now on this company dealing with a reality that it did not unfold the way that you had hoped for. So How was that for you.

Jason Smith: Yeah that’s a great question. The psychology of it. The dynamics of it. So I think again I was I was lucky in the first company I was naive enough to go into business with my friends without funding and just it worked the second business I didn’t even think about I just thought of course it’s going to be successful so jump right into it and go. Had I thought about my reputation had I thought too much about I don’t want to screw up the next thing I don’t want to be seen as a one hit wonder I might not have done it and then I think you you get caught and frozen like ah I have to rethink and overthink each opportunity that comes my way in this case because I did it it failed. You’re just in it. All of a sudden you realize that. What are the reasons why the other one succeeded and you take a hard look at that recognize timing recognize luck recognize that you can earn some of that luck but there’s a lot of luck involved in figuring out your business at that time. So um I think my psychology in the beginning it was damaging. And then turned into a strength where I recognized that a lot of it was out of my control that it wasn’t necessarily me that I would execute again against something else and it could be successful based on the right alchemy of timing and people and funding and that I should just get after it and try and find the next thing right away. Instead of being frozen I have a number of entrepreneur friends that you know they were successful the first time and they kind of froze for the next one they didn’t want to have the next one fail and it kind of precluded them from jumping forward the way they did in the first one. So in my case again naively because it was a pretty quick failure I recognized that. It wasn’t all me and that I could just get on back on the horse and try again. So into the third one

Alejandro: Now yeah I know and and we’ll talk about it because really cool. What you guys are doing now in your case what you did after is you did a little bit of angel investing then you you know, helped them. You know another another bunch of organizations to really you know, get their stuff together you know and you did it successfully. But. 1 thing that I thought it was really interesting in your case is that at a certain point you decide to you know, get your kids out of school and just travel the world with your family. You know one of the things that that I love about people that that have that opportunity that you had of traveling the world is that. You get to experience different cultures and to a certain degree that opens up the way that you look at things and your perspective. So how do you think that traveling around the world for a year impacted you.

Jason Smith: Oh wow. Yeah, so let’s skip the 5 companies I’ve been involved with and just focus on that I’ll tell everybody you know cut out and do a gap year, especially if you have a family and take them off-grid. Get them out of their comfort zone of where they’re at and take them around the world to different cultures. So you know look my I turned 40 um I was 4 businesses in before starting my fifth business I wanted to make sure I had to reset the previous business which we’ll get to I know vision critical like it was. It was heavy. You know you’re working twelve thirteen hour days nonstop like six seven days a week and I missed a lot of bed tuckins and so there I was having you know kids that were born when I started that in that company and then they were 7 and 8 when I looked around and said I need to connect with them again. Happen to turn 40 at that time too. So you kind of look forward. You look backward. It’s not a magic birthday but it it forces you to have some introspection I find and so I decided to yeah, just ah, just quit my job. My wife quit her job. We bought 4 around the world plane tickets. We pulled our kids from school. And we went to 13 different countries including Egypt in the middle of the revolution and the thinking was how do we get? our kids were growing up. You know with a bit of a silver spoon they were talking about who had the better more comfortable theater lounge amongst their friends and I was very perturbed and and uncomfortable with that. So. Bring him on the road and having experiential travel I’ll call it. This wasn’t staying at 4 seasons and fancy places this was trying to you know rent small places vrbos and and live for a year in a relatively inexpensive way. But you’re going like we started in Croatia then we went to turkey and so they’re hearing. Call to prayer for the first time and they’re saying what is that? So for me, it was experiencing the world through my kids’ eyes reconnecting with my family. My wife had to get used to now somebody that was full time back in the family. So and you’re with each other twenty four seven so three meals a day nonstop. There’s no escape. Have to figure out how to work together as a family so not only do you see the world but you figure out a cadence that works well with your kids your wife as a family and so to me it. It became the the foundational connection that we’ve built our family on and frankly, enabled me to do this next fifth company because there was. You know now a connection that we could go back on and talk about riding camels out of watty rum or in you know the Amazon jungle when there was a spider on your hand and seeing a traantula come out of his out of their hole. You know those are things that you can just they’re so vivid.

Jason Smith: On your memory stack that you can pull them out at any dinner in the future and reconnect with your family and when you’re entrepreneurs, you’re spending a lot of time away from your family. So it’s important to have those quick connects and it’s really hard to do that on grid. So I encourage everybody to get off grid and try that.

Alejandro: Now in your case you know before you got started with clue you I mean you you ah you you played the advisory role with investment banking operations and and so forth, but you actually took 500 coffee meetings before you know, even starting a clue. so so I guess

Jason Smith: Yeah.

Alejandro: You know, especially for the people that are listening that are now thinking about partnering up with someone or or how to deal with people I mean when you take five hundred coffees you get to you get to? really you know experience human beings. So so what did you learn? What was you know your 3 biggest lessons from those five hundred coffees

Jason Smith: Well I’ll provide a bit of perspective on it because I have a bit of a theory if you’re thinking about starting a company of how to approach it first you know and this is me coming back from this trip around the world knowing that I wanted to start my fifth company and get involved with you know, something new and it’s all consuming. And I had a number of ideas when I came back 17 different ideas and so I needed to wheel those down into something I got it down to maybe 5 and the coffee meetings were a way to kind of like streamline those ideas and then find which you had the deepest conviction around so I went into those meetings I called them. Like smart person meetings and 500 was excessive but I had the financial flexibility to be able to do that for a full year before starting you know a hundred a hundred smart person. Meetings are the best way to know if you truly have conviction over an idea and you need to start every meeting with this. I need you to tell me honestly how stupid this idea is where the challenges are what I’m missing because I’m going to spend the next ten years of my life chasing this and you could save me a lot of time if you tell me how stupid it is because nobody wants to tell you your baby’s ugly nobody wants to tell you. That that idea is stupid. There’s nothing in it for them so you need to give them the permission to be able to to beat up your idea and you’ll walk out of those meetings with new insights new areas to investigate and you’re going to go and look at those areas that were gaps and you’re going to come back with either more conviction or less conviction around your idea. And you’ll walk into the next meeting then ready for an answer for that to be challenged and it might reveal new information and again it’s kind of I call it repeat layers of conviction or break apart. Where you’re going to realize that it’s not the idea that you should be chasing. It’s not something that you keep scratching and go there’s deeper there. There’s more there. There’s something there and if it’s not the case then you should walk away because these are ideas that you need to go into with a decade framework. Not a 1 year get some money. Let’s see if we can exit. I think if like what I’m doing with clue is my life’s work I want to spend the next two decades on building an enduring company and so if you can short circuitrcuit that next decade with 100 smart person meetings with your deepening conviction or not It’s the best use of time you could possibly do I also did some. Some vetting of what I thought could be my next co-founder at the same time so looking I’m a business person so I was looking more for the technical co-founder so those hundred person meetings technical co-founder vetting and finding and convincing and conviction setting on whether or not truly I wanted to do clue.

Alejandro: So in terms of finding the cofounder I mean what are some of things to look for. So.

Jason Smith:  Yeah, so I I had so trust I’m going to say is the number 1 thing I mean clearly you need competence in whatever the complimentary areas that you want. So if you’re the technical founder looking for the business and go to market person you want to compliment that vice versa in my case. So. Um, the challenge with finding a great technical cofounder is anybody who is strong technically could either do their own thing or has you know massive million dollar jobs in front of them. Opportunities. So you are your first test is can you convince somebody to do the vision. That you have or at least co-shape that vision that you’ve initially got and that’s that’s a tall order for technical cofounders that can build things on their own and so you spend a lot of time meeting people and trying to assess their ability but also seeing if they’re yeah passionate about the idea that you’re pursuing and can you combine it. And my case I went through a number of people. In fact I found someone initially before I started clue officially work with them for six months talked about equity splits how we would kind of co-found it what we would do side by side working for six months side by side me paying him very talented engineer. Um, probably 12 years into his career and um and then we worked something out on a Friday and thought we’d had it dialed and on Monday he comes in and tells me after six months of working together I’m leaving to New Zealand for three months and I’m leaving in four weeks and I thought that. Why why wouldn’t you tell me that as we’re working side by side for six months and negotiating equity and starting a company and um, he said oh well I think I did that like six months ago you don’t remember and it’s one of those things where when you’re desperate to start your company and you finally found the person that you think is great and it’s working pretty well and they’re really smart then. Can you look past that or not and I think it’s a moment you have to look in the mirror and ask about trust if you can’t trust your co-founder the way that you you need to trust your partner in life if you can’t trust them you will doubt everything from there on in so when you come into a difficult situation in the future. You’ll be like is there something they’re not telling me. And you can’t go forward building a massive business with that background seed germ out of an idea it becomes toxic. So um, you know what I thought was we’d figured out a handshake. Cheers beer on Friday to this news on Monday shut everything down on the wednesday. And put it on a shelf for a year and did a couple other advisory pieces and then ultimately found my current co-founder sarathy where it’s been magic since day one.

Alejandro: And why clue I mean you had always see quite a bit of time to really think you know this idea through. So why? why did you think that clue was the idea that you had to go for.

Jason Smith: Yeah, it came from an experience in my previous company. So at visioncritical we know we built that company from 8 people to five six hundred people who was competing in the customer intelligence kind of survey space against qualtrics and you’re starting to build a category there. It was online communities online surveys. Was relatively new There was a lot of offline research being done at that point and certainly not communities and people that you could go back to and repeat conversations with and when we were doing that I realized that my salespeople were pitching increasingly educated prospects that were telling us more about the competitors and than we knew and it was embarrassing. And literally I had prospects go wow I don’t know that competitor does that really? well, you’re telling me they don’t that’s odd mitigating trust and I thought this is this is silly. We need to know what our competitors are doing much better than winging it and with 100 salespeople scatter the world I knew that problem was exacerbated beyond the ones that I was seeing. So I um I asked her product management team to put together a fantastic wiki and they did that and it was killer for two weeks and then it got out of date and then nobody went to it and then I think I just said this is this is a problem that needs to be solved 100 smart person meetings later got into it and said. I think there’s a number of dovetailing trends that make it now the time to chase ah ml natural language processing and what was happening there to get insights from unstructured data was a trend that was happening more and more competitors like you looked at the marte stack. It was what a couple hundred and. 15 and it’s like over 10000 now. So every category was getting more crowded more and more competitors prospects way more educated doing all their research ahead of talking to a salesperson so the dovetailing of trends just made it obvious to start this company now and I think it’ll be it’ll be as obvious as. You know, video on the internet. It’s unreasonable to think that every company in the world wouldn’t have an understanding of their competitors every company in the world has 3 things in common. They’ve got employees. They’ve got customers and they’ve got competitors and there’s lots of software for employees and for customers. But there’s really nothing. Competitive understanding and yet those competitors never go away. They’re constantly adapting and constantly changing so the vision for clue was simply how do we bring all of that knowledge of what your team internally has about those competitors and what the web knows into one central single source of truth. So that you can figure out how to outmaneuver them. Yeah, it’s Saas product so we charge by user and mix a competitor and user but effectively by user and it’s saas on a monthly billing.

Alejandro: And how do you guys make money.

Alejandro: And in terms of capitalizing the business. How did you guys go about that.

Jason Smith: Yeah, well because because it was my fifth company and my cofounder he he was heavily involved in the open source world. He was on a scholarship to University Of Michigan to do his ph d in computer science and got involved in co-writing an open source world language called pearl back in the day. Became very well known also as chief technologist of a 5000 person company called sofoss and wrotede a program to separate relevant mail from I relevantt mail like this software product and and- spam and that 100,000,000 people use. So he’s a bit of a tech gun and then I’d done a couple things on the on the business side. So. We were in the fortunate position when I started a clue that I could put a deck together and say this is what we’re going to do and we got a million dollars in angel funding on the back of that deck. But what I tell a lot of founders is if you haven’t done something before you can’t do that any story you hear about people getting that done. Forget it. Got to focus on traction we had spent you know 20 years building credibility that we could do something and so that enabled us to get $1000000 in the pot and basically build what we promised to build and or at least the shell of it and that led to our first institutional round a 3,000,000 round that ors led. And that was back in 2017 so then we had I think we had like 50 k and a r back in that time it was very early but we had big client in dell that was believing in us and starting to grow with us and then and then it was three years later and actually we did. We raised our a round a $50,000,000 a that David Sachon K Craft ventures led at like the height of covid I literally kicked off on Monday the whatever it was the twentieth and it was back when all the vcs were struggling to figure out how to use Zoom. Let alone actually fund companies on zoom so we were super early and it was awkward because the company was kicking ass and what I thought were two vcs that were going to fund it. We like well no, no, no, no this is going to be a disaster in covid we’re not doing anything and that was short-lived and. But within six weeks we had 3 term sheets and closed a $50,000,000 round with craft um and then last year we had Tiger and salesforce tiger led the round a $62,000,000 round in our bee and so now heavily capitalized strong balance sheet going into. Maybe what looks like turbulent times. We’re 3 x more funded than anyone else in the category and think think we’ve got a shot and it’s actually eljandro one of the lessons I learned from my previous business that was undercapitalized at vision criticalical and saw a company called qualtrix kind of race past it when they took 70000000 in funding from sequoia that funding can make a difference.

Jason Smith: And attracting the right clients in ah, creating the momentum for employees and and so we were more aggressive with clue than I was with vision critical or elit is now what it’s called in my previous business.

Alejandro: So I guess for the people that are not that good at math. What is then the total amount they raise for clue got it now in terms of the um I would say let’s talk about vision here so you were you are alluding to before. So imagine you were to go to sleep tonight.

Jason Smith: Eighty one million us.

Alejandro: And you wake up in a world where the vision of clue is fully realized what does that world look like.

Jason Smith: Every company has a clear lens into what their competitors are doing personalized for each division salespeople have the content that they need to answer how do I compare How do you Compare. To Competitor X Y and Z a customer success person can sniff that a competitor is sneaking around their client base. They can defend and expand their clients. A marketing team can optimize their marketing relative to what their competitors are doing in the marketing Arena A talent team can hire. Against certain competitors that are doing a great job of recruiting relative to them. They can understand their cultures and what those people are paid and be able to navigate the complexity of competitive talent strategy teams can figure out where to build next. Product teams can understand what features have your competitors built that are a waste of time versus worthy of investing what are table stakes that you must do? What’s overinvested by your competitors that people don’t care about So My belief is that every company in the world will have a single source of truth to understand their market and their competitors. And the insights that are gathered both internally and externally will be personalized down to the each division needing and getting what they have for running their particular area of the business more effectively relative to the competition.

Alejandro: So I love it now for the people that are listening to get an understanding of the scope and size of clue today I mean anything that you can share in terms of maybe like number of employees or anything else that you feel comfortable sharing.

Jason Smith: Yeah, sure. Yeah, we’ve got. We’ve just actually come through 200 employees so we were about but 50 at the start of covid we’re about but 200 now we expect to add another probably at least 100 in the next twelve months we’ve run the company incredibly capital efficiently. So it was one of the attractions I think first here is be raise so we’ve got a strong balance sheet going into the future. We’re cresting over 500 clients large enterprises hundreds of thousands of users and so we’re starting to see real momentum. We’re seen as thought leaders. So it’s. It’s all of the pieces that are starting to come together nicely and the category is warming up and building but business wise it feels like it feels like everything is coming together now and we continue to double and triple each year

Alejandro: Now imagine if I put you into a time machine and I bring you back in time I bring you back in time where we’re still in that dot com you know craciness era everything looking great. You’re now thinking about like what you’re gonna be building to be part of that move into and you have the opportunity of having a chat. With your younger self with that younger Json and you’re able to give that younger Jason 1 piece of advice before launching a business. What would that be and why given what you know now after you know, being able with 5 companies make may.

Jason Smith: Qua just one. There’s a litany that stupid young Jason Smith I’d have a I’ve had a long chat with him alaro. Ah okay, that sounds good. So one of the things that I would tell that young Jason Smith is think way bigger.

Alejandro: So one give give us 1 and 1 bonus one.

Jason Smith: Then what you’re currently thinking and I think that is one of the challenges when you’re young, you know, maybe a company in your local arena like we were in Vancouver. So a you know? ah ah the hydro company in in British Columbia was like a big deal. Should have been thinking about at and t you know having our services we should be thinking way bigger. We should be thinking. Why can’t it be us to actually dominate a global position and I think that’s one of the things you come out and you think everybody is older wiser smarter better funded can’t be you so you need to look at yourself in the mirror and go it can be just chase. It. Think bigger, you’re going to spend the same 12 hours a day that you’re spending no matter what? so might as well chase something big and see if it works so that would be the first piece of advice the other piece of advice that I give Jason is a lot of the culture imprint is going to come from how you react as a founder. Situations early on. You’re not going to probably perfectly define your culture. Even if you put up some values on a wall. The values come from how you approach every decision and how people see you interpret those decisions. So. Where you sacrifice your integrity on 1 thing and maybe white lie on something people will see that and that becomes part of your culture if you are not people speaking to people directly about an issue and instead actually talking around their back and being more polite instead of being direct. That’ll be your culture. So just recognize that everything you do as a founder is magnified and creates the cultural Dna the imprint by which you’re going to establish your company culture in the future.

Alejandro: Wow! Very profound Json and for the people that are listening you know for them to be able to reach out and say hi. What is the best way to do so.

Jason Smith: Yeah I’m I’m at Jason S on Twitter I’m slash one moresmith on Linkedin but just look at Jason Smith clue there’s a couple smiths out there. So where you’re gonna have to put in clue with the k and and find me on Linkedin.

Alejandro: Amazing! Well Jason thank you so much for being on the deal maker show. It has been an honor to have you you.

Jason Smith: Pleasure.

* * *
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Neil Patel

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