Latest / AI for Founders with Ryan Estes / The $40,000 Desk: Why Offices Will Never Be the Same Again

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The $40,000 Desk: Why Offices Will Never Be the Same Again · AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

0:00
Welcome back to AI for Founders. I'm Ryan Estes.
0:02
You're probably feeling the whiplash right now.
0:05
Your office lease was signed in 2018 for 10 years, and your team
0:08
is half remote. Your desks cost 15 to $40,000 a
0:12
year. And your people are either
0:13
lonely at home or resentful about being dragged back to the
0:16
office. Today, I'm talking with someone
0:18
who went through the fire on this.
0:20
Dan Bladen is the founder of Cadence.
0:23
That is Cadence with AK, the workplace operations platform
0:26
behind hundreds of companies Fortune fifties 10,000 and
0:30
member teams. 10s of millions of dollars raised after a brutal
0:33
pivot from dead in the water hardware to must have SAS.
0:37
In this conversation, you will learn how to turn empty and
0:39
expensive offices into a real advantage, how to design A
0:43
hybrid cadence that actually improves mentorship and family
0:46
life, why sales and engineering need to share the same oxygen
0:49
sometimes, and what founder LED marketing does for enterprise
0:53
deals. If you're a founder, operator,
0:55
head of workplace, real estate leader, or just a sales dog
0:58
wondering where your team should actually actually sit, this
1:01
episode is for you. But before we get into it with
1:03
Dan from Cadence, if you want more conversations like this
1:06
where founders talk about hybrid work, AI office protocols, and
1:11
actual revenue numbers, get on the newsletter at AI For
1:14
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1:23
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1:34
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2:59
Dan, welcome to the show. Brian, nice to meet you.
3:03
I love the I love the Pearl snaps.
3:05
Thank you and I appreciate you asking about it.
3:07
I'm a big fan of the Pearl Snap shirt, particularly the Rock
3:11
Mount Pearl Snap shirt. I'll let the readers find out
3:14
what's up with Rock Mount. Maybe I'll put a little
3:16
something in the show notes, but great company, great Denver
3:19
company. Shout out to them.
3:21
Yeah, I lived in the, I lived in the US for a while up until the
3:24
last two months. I honestly thought Pearl Snap
3:26
was like a cover band for Pearl Jam.
3:28
I had no idea people talking about Pearl Snaps all the time.
3:31
I was like, OK, but I, I've, I've been learning, I've been
3:34
acclimating as you guys see. Amazing.
3:36
So you must have been in Austin when someone was saying to Greg.
3:39
I was, yeah. I was DFW actually.
3:42
But yes, I was. I was down that way, yeah.
3:45
That's awesome. Well, I'll let our, our, our
3:47
Texas audience and neighbors know that the Pearl Snap shirt
3:51
shirt originated in Denver. Now Denver and Austin have like
3:55
a, a healthy relationship where, you know, we're like cousins.
3:59
So I, I know how popular the Pearl Snap is in Austin, but I
4:02
just let them know that like actually it's from Denver, you
4:05
know, is there, is there an, an English equivalent to the pal
4:11
snap? No, I mean the Oxford collar
4:15
would be like the quintessential shirt you'd want to wear as a as
4:22
a biz said British man that knows what he's doing.
4:26
So the Oxford collar would be probably the most.
4:28
I don't think there is AI mean there's obviously, you know, you
4:31
might have a nice coat with some some nice toggles on it at
4:35
Christmas time. I don't think there's a button
4:39
niche that I know I know about, or at least maybe I didn't get
4:44
to that particular level of class in society before I left.
4:48
What's the important subject matter?
4:49
Because I, I personally think men's fashion matters and I
4:53
think the contributions from, you know, the English fashion
4:56
have have largely been in need of perhaps a, a resurgence, you
5:01
know, coming back if I think about to like, let's talk about
5:04
the 18th century. That style was pretty
5:08
impressive. You had those beautiful jackets,
5:11
well tailored, high collar, but then they had the big brass
5:14
buttons that to the long tail and then kind of the short Capri
5:18
pants with the long socks and the shinable shoes.
5:22
I got married in tails, I got married in in morning dress.
5:25
So yeah, I know that vibe. Well, there wasn't around in the
5:28
1800s, but yes, I am. We're probably following the
5:32
same accounts on on Twitter. That's very much bringing back,
5:38
I guess, what eighties, 80s fashion, men's fashion seems
5:41
like. Well, I, I, I, I don't give many
5:45
compliments on the, on the, my attire.
5:47
So I appreciate it. Now I want to get into this
5:50
interview. But before we do, I did do a lot
5:52
of research on you and I realize you're an avid outdoorsman and a
5:55
camper with your family. So I wanted to get a sense of
5:59
who you are, you know, So are you into glamping?
6:03
Are you a car camper? Are you a backpacker?
6:07
Or are you one of these minimalist psychos that just
6:09
brings like a tarp and wanders into the woods?
6:11
Barefoot, yeah. We got three kids, 10 and under.
6:14
My wife and I went camp travelling around the world for
6:17
six months with backpacks back in 2012.
6:19
We went from South America up through Central America, around
6:23
Australia, New Zealand, up through Singapore, Malaysia,
6:28
Thailand, then through into India, which was pretty minimal.
6:32
You know, we put our life in storage for six months and did
6:34
that. But no, with kids, it's in
6:37
California. I mean, it's hardly called
6:39
camping in California. Everyone, it makes it very easy
6:41
for you. Rock up with a 10 from Walmart.
6:44
There's everything's good for you.
6:46
There's benches, there's sunshine, there is some nice
6:49
weather. You know, they almost hand out
6:52
the s'mores, right? So no, it's very easy, very
6:54
minimal. Yeah, we'd have to go to Tahoe.
6:56
There's some great beaches around where we live in the Bay
6:58
Area that we can head out to and obviously the redwoods and stuff
7:01
as well. So yeah, no, no glamping.
7:04
Definitely like Walmart family, REI sponsored camping.
7:10
Nothing, nothing too at crazy. But comfortable, you know, I
7:13
love car camping for that reason.
7:14
With young kids, you know it's all about the proper snacks.
7:18
You got the right snacks. You're going to have a great
7:20
camping trip. Amen.
7:22
Amazing. Now I the the the trip you took,
7:25
you said six months. You guys were backpack across
7:27
the world. That's incredible.
7:29
That was before your children were born.
7:32
Yeah, we had them. We went travelling about 18
7:34
months before we had our first child and I was, I was 25, we
7:38
had our first kid. So yeah, we got married at 18
7:42
months together and then we both, yeah, left our jobs and
7:46
and went off, which is fun. Amazing.
7:49
Love it. I'm going to come back to that.
7:50
But first I want to get into your company Cadence and I'm
7:54
really interested. It's Cadence with ak.co.
7:57
And I'm really interesting because I feel like I have
7:59
something to learn here about workplace operations and you
8:03
happen to have the number one best in the world workplace
8:07
operations platform. So give us a quick introduction
8:10
to exactly kind of what Cadence does and who they do it for.
8:13
Yeah. So as you probably heard, over
8:15
the last five years, the way the world works has changed forever.
8:18
Companies, even though they might talk about going back to
8:21
the office and they might be mandated to go back to the
8:24
office, or even the US federal government might be telling you,
8:26
you need to go back to the office, the data tells a very
8:28
different picture. And so we help companies
8:32
optimize their corporate real estate and coordinate their
8:36
employees. We think that those two items,
8:39
people and places are the two largest cost Centers for any
8:41
company and that that should be optimized.
8:44
It's crazy. Ryan leases offices are
8:48
generally 7 to 10 years. And so if you think about it, we
8:52
there's about 55% of all offices out there in the Western world
8:56
that have yet to come up for renewal since the pandemic.
8:59
And most of our customers are going from a one to one person
9:02
to desk ratio to sometimes a three to one person to desk
9:06
ratio. And so there's just so much
9:08
savings to be made. Some data recently came out that
9:11
says that from Cushman and Wakefield that says that offices
9:15
pre pandemic were only ever 65% occupied at peak times.
9:21
So pre pandemic 65% occupied at peak times.
9:24
Post pandemic we're now up to 51% of pre pandemic peaks.
9:29
And so there is a glut of real estate, an absolute butt of real
9:35
estate, and it has huge, huge implications on tax bases, the
9:41
way people live their lives, pension funds, particularly in
9:44
Europe that are very exposed to offices.
9:47
And so we help companies optimize that their real estate
9:51
and coordinate their people so that they can make the way they
9:54
work and where they work a competitive advantage.
9:57
How do you optimize the real estate?
9:59
Does that mean actually finding like selling or in case cases
10:04
where they're they don't have ownership, they're getting out
10:06
of their lease, they're subleasing?
10:07
How do you optimize real estate? Did I say one of our customers,
10:10
Fortune 50 customer company, you would have heard of them.
10:13
And they've gone from 10.1 to 4.7 million square feet, offices
10:17
in Chicago, London, New York, all over the world.
10:20
And pre pandemic, they're like, hey, we've got too much office
10:23
space. We're going to move to more of
10:24
an agile way of working. We're not going to be in the
10:27
office every day. So we don't need to give
10:29
everybody a desk. And so we're going to reduce our
10:31
real estate. So they started off on this
10:32
campaign and as they went through this change management
10:35
campaign, they're basically like, hey, we need software to
10:38
load balance our spaces so that we never oversubscribed and
10:41
people don't have desks. We need software to coordinate
10:43
who's going to come in when. So how does the marketing team
10:46
in Manhattan overlap with the marketing team in add with the
10:49
sales team in Manhattan, for example.
10:52
And so you get the best out of your working week.
10:54
So think of it as an operating system for how you manage less
10:58
real estate inside of your company, as well as coordinating
11:01
your people. And to give you a sense right up
11:04
until I mean, these offices are bloody expensive, right?
11:08
And so the what we're seeing with high end law firms, about
11:14
$15,000 is what you should expect to pay for a desk a year,
11:18
which is crazy when you think about $15,000 a desk.
11:21
That's your leasing costs, your utilities, your insurance, your
11:26
Diet Coke and cereal bars, right?
11:28
That's $15,000. I spoke with a tech company here
11:30
3 weeks ago. They're at $40,000 a desk a
11:34
year. And so with Wall Street focusing
11:37
on how companies are performing as the number one metric right
11:41
now, and there isn't much, you know, nobody's getting
11:44
celebrated having too many people on their cost base right
11:47
now either. Optimizing your real estate is a
11:51
huge low hat piece of low hanging fruit.
11:54
You bet, which is largely going to be talking about downsizing
11:57
as far as the conversation goes right now, you know, let's talk
12:01
a little bit about the factors that are contributing. 1, you
12:03
have just maybe COVID exposed that like with Zoom calls, maybe
12:08
people are more productive. People are probably much more
12:12
happy in the short term. I think there's also probably
12:15
some pretty compelling evidence that when people are at their
12:19
Home Office too long, it gets weird.
12:21
You know, they feel lonely, you know, they, they, they, they,
12:26
they lack the ability to get better.
12:29
Because a lot of what I think this, I'm just anecdotal, I'm
12:32
just talking off the cuff going on this my own is that you, you
12:35
can't really mentor somebody through a Zoom call, you know
12:38
what I mean? So the generation gap from the,
12:41
the Gen. ZS that are coming to the
12:42
workforce, they're sitting in their bedrooms trying to do a
12:44
job with the SOP and, and some automation.
12:48
They're not really going to get better as quickly as if
12:51
literally what you why they call it taking someone under their
12:54
wing, you know, like a bird where you're like, don't know,
12:57
come sit here. This is what you do.
12:58
You can, you can say so much more, but you have, so you have
13:02
that, you have the, the COVID effect where people can and
13:05
maybe desire to work from home, But then you have, you know,
13:09
near shoring or offshoring where it's like, well, actually, you
13:13
know, companies can, it makes sense to find talent all across
13:17
the world. If we're working from Zoom
13:18
calls, what does it matter if they're in Chicago or if they're
13:21
in Bangladesh? You know, like let's capitalize
13:24
and, and democratize talent across the entire globe.
13:27
And then there's benefits for people on both sides.
13:29
And then you have kind of, you know, for the last couple of
13:31
years now, everyone's trying to create either agentic solutions
13:35
for employees or literally calling them AI employees.
13:38
And all these things are kind of contributing to when people are
13:42
thinking about optimizing real estate, they're thinking about
13:45
downsizing real estate. Yeah, no, Is it, I mean, you
13:49
just touched on so many of the reasons why this topic has not
13:51
been out of the press for five years, because it involves
13:54
people's personal lives, it involves people's health, it
13:57
involves people's finances, it involves their sense of being a
14:00
part of a family or a community. And so it touches on so many
14:03
aspects of what the modern autonomous Western person
14:08
values. And so that's why it hasn't gone
14:09
out of the the news. A couple of points that that
14:13
that you talked about there. So you talked about mentorship
14:16
and coming under a particular person's wing.
14:18
So we're seeing time to partner by which we mean at law firms,
14:22
associates becoming partners has grown by about 40% in London.
14:26
So it's taking longer for people to graduate to partnerships in
14:30
London because of some of the the overexp or too much remote
14:34
happening. You know, you and I both here
14:38
living, breathing, we're reliant upon a rhythm happening in our
14:41
hearts right now. The you know, and so I'm a big
14:44
believer. I've got a background in
14:45
theology that the world is built around rhythms and a cadence,
14:50
which is kind of where the name comes from.
14:51
And so we think there is this cadence of in office heads up
14:55
time where you have faster time to decision you on board quicker
14:59
and you get up skilled as you talked about as well.
15:03
But also there is this cadence of, Hey, I can get my head down
15:07
right now. I know what I'm working on.
15:09
I can go and get on with what I'm working on in a way that is
15:12
more productive. And so we certainly see this
15:15
kind of, and I'm seeing a lot on Reddit as well, like the RTO
15:19
threads on subreddits on on Reddit for the last three years
15:22
have been, Hey, how dare you make me return.
15:25
I've changed a little bit more to I'm driving myself insane,
15:30
being remote all the time. And so, yeah, we do think there
15:33
is this cadence of how you should work.
15:37
Yeah, and it's a mix of both. It's very interesting.
15:40
You know, largely, you know, we've probably been without AHQ
15:45
maybe 12 months before that. As soon as we can get back to
15:50
office, we got back to office. And, and for me in particular,
15:54
you know, that I can kind of keep tabs on people because, you
15:58
know, I'm an investor, I'm a operator, I'm a entrepreneur,
16:03
I'm a lot of different things, but at my my core, I'm a sales
16:06
dog, you know what I mean? I know that I want to be banging
16:10
the phones. I want to be like bringing
16:12
energy every single day. And that is something I had to
16:16
learn from other great sales guys.
16:18
It's like, hey, man, I don't care what happened last night.
16:20
I don't care if your dog died, whatever.
16:22
We're bringing energy today and we're going to go, you know, and
16:26
so you kind of need like that exemplar.
16:28
So I, my salespeople, they're with me.
16:30
I'm like, now I need to see you. I need you to feel my energy.
16:33
I want to feel your energy. And we're going to grow like
16:36
that because, you know, sad money don't make none, you know
16:39
what I mean? And and so you see that a lot is
16:41
people get lost at home and you, you, you get them on a Zoom call
16:45
and they're just like, hey, dude, you OK, man?
16:50
Bring this energy up. At least fake it.
16:52
So, yeah, the Cadence, very interesting.
16:54
Now, you also said something about you went to school for
16:57
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17:01
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18:00
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19:05
Well, I'm just touching on that, that point as well about sales
19:07
team. So yeah, we've got several hubs
19:09
around the world, predominantly 2 main hubs, Dulcos, Northern
19:13
Ireland, which is where we have product and engineering and then
19:15
they go to market hub predominantly around Salt Lake
19:18
City and Utah here in the US And where we are, our SDRS, our
19:22
BDRS, we're encouraged to be in the office as much, as much as
19:25
possible because of that overhearing the encouragement,
19:29
the energy that comes off of that for the reasons that you
19:31
mentioned. And we're seeing most of our
19:32
customers put sales teams in particular together.
19:35
We've got about 600 customers around the world.
19:37
That represents about 10,000 said 10,000 teams inside of
19:41
those companies as well. So we are seeing those grouped
19:45
cadences together. Yeah, theology.
19:48
I mean, I was doing another company before Cadence that we
19:51
pivoted Cadence into. But yeah, the background in
19:53
theology and my parents were my mums and pastor, my grandparents
19:57
are both pastors. I actually worked for a church
19:59
in London for five years from the age of 18, where I did music
20:03
and tech at this this large church in West London.
20:06
And so now it's always been a part of like, how do we how do
20:09
we win big, but how do we win really, really well?
20:12
And I think there's some ancient truths that have.
20:16
You know, been tested by millennia and that still hold
20:18
true today, you know, seasons, rhythms of life being being one
20:22
of those. And my hope is that we can, we
20:24
can get and help society create a cadence for this modern way of
20:29
working where, you know, I'd love to think that we can move
20:33
the needle on divorce rates lowering.
20:36
I'd love to think that we can move the needle on kids knowing
20:38
their parents a little bit more and perhaps not having as much
20:41
therapy when they're off to because of the way mom and dad
20:45
worked. You asked about where people are
20:47
spending their time with a cadence.
20:50
We're seeing people give an hour back to the company a day on
20:54
average and taking an hour back as well from from their commute
21:00
to their families. So how does that work?
21:02
So on average, we're seeing about two hours worth of
21:05
commuting that is being either optimized or saved for a
21:08
particular day. So if you've got an hour into
21:11
New York and now backed home New York or London or insert metro,
21:16
you know, I've been up to San Francisco, live in the Valley,
21:18
but back to San Francisco five times in the last 10 days.
21:21
You know, that's that's an hour each way for me.
21:24
And so people are giving an hour back to their family when
21:28
they're not commuting, but they're also giving an hour more
21:30
to work. And what we've found is that, so
21:35
I'd love to, I'd love to think that we could move the needle
21:37
societally for that as well. But what we're finding is that
21:40
when you don't put the hard and fast rules around people as
21:43
well, when you do lead with grace, for the most part, if you
21:47
have a high trust business and you're actually seeing people
21:51
take a lot less sick days. So that's coming out in the
21:54
data. People are not sick as much as
21:56
they were previously and taking days off.
21:59
But then also, you know, if you're not saying, hey, you've
22:03
got to be in four or five days a week, you're seeing people.
22:06
Then once the kids are down, perhaps turning back on doing a
22:09
little bit extra and moving the needle forward towards hitting
22:12
that OK R or that key result. Whereas if there's much more
22:16
about you do this, I do this command in line and you're
22:20
seeing people go, well I'm going to stop because I'm going to
22:23
stop at 5. You forced me to come in, so I'm
22:26
going to force you to be within my sort of remit as well.
22:31
Yeah, five days in a row going and getting off of the office is
22:35
that's rough man. I get that.
22:37
You know, hybrid does seem to be like kind of evolving as as the
22:42
optimal way to work now, so. And the average in the US, the
22:47
apps are the average, is to put into numbers.
22:49
The average US employee would take a $13,000 pay cut to not go
22:55
into the office every day, which is bonkers, right?
23:00
Obviously you have to be of a certain size to salary to make
23:03
that work, but on average for a desk worker in the US it's about
23:07
$13,000. How many people were smoking
23:10
cigarettes just so they could step out of the office for 15
23:12
minutes? You know, a lot.
23:15
So now. One and that's playing out in
23:17
the day to two. I mean it's just fast like all
23:19
the knock on effects, right? We're seeing people you you get
23:23
fired less if you're in the same metro as your boss.
23:27
So presenteeism is still a thing.
23:29
You're getting promoted quicker if you're in the same office as
23:32
your boss. And so there is a whole like
23:36
gaming of this that could happen to you.
23:39
But really it's just I like to think of it a little bit like
23:42
sports. I'm a Warriors fan, given the
23:44
Bay Area was very easy to be a Warriors fan and kudos to you
23:48
guys over there in Denver for the last few seasons.
23:50
But you know, everybody knows that the job if you're a
23:53
Warriors player is to give the ball to Steph.
23:56
Like that is the goal. And if you have companies
23:59
aligned, they know what the goal is, then we should see a whole
24:02
lot more like investment in in the companies we've just
24:07
announced. Tracy Hawkins, the global head
24:10
of real estate and VP workplace at Open AI, has just joined our
24:12
strategic Advisory Board. She's not asking people to come
24:16
into the office at Open AI. Every time I go in, it is
24:20
packed. People are on a mission, they're
24:22
building something, they're excited about it, they want to
24:25
do it with each other. And so I think a lot of it's on
24:28
leadership as well to try and create that sense of
24:30
togetherness and and common vision.
24:33
Percent. You know, I thought the the
24:36
mission of the Warriors was to hard.
24:38
Found the paint with Draymond. Draymond's a victim.
24:43
Draymond's a victim. He's not worth.
24:45
Yeah. No, no, I, I agree.
24:46
You know, and largely, you know, I've been entrepreneur for years
24:50
with, you know, half dozen startups.
24:52
And so it's always mission driven.
24:55
And so that's the selling point always when until you get that
24:57
kind of collaboration, now you have larger, more established
25:01
enterprise organizations. And you know, that comes with
25:03
its own challenges. And often times, you know, maybe
25:07
a large part of their assets are built up in the ownership of the
25:11
office spaces that they've got. So making sure that there's
25:14
butts and seats is actually like important to their the value of
25:18
their company even, Yeah. Yeah.
25:20
And you see that in JP Morgan's big kind of very newsworthy
25:24
returns of this. The truth is, if you talk to
25:27
JPM, which I had done multiple times, they don't have enough
25:30
desks to everybody. If they did have everybody come
25:32
back into the office every week, it doesn't actually work.
25:36
And So what people actually have is their lending book on their
25:38
loan book versus what they're doing in reality can often tell
25:42
a story too. Yeah.
25:44
You know, part of the reason it's good to have sales guys
25:46
together is because they're going to be loud and obnoxious
25:48
and they're not going to get the side eyes from people when
25:51
you're thinking about optimizing workspaces.
25:53
And you only got you got 14 desks per employee.
25:56
So their people are going to have to take turns.
25:58
What are kind of traditionally, like the groups you want to put
26:00
together? Is it like admin and fulfillment
26:04
or is it, you know, sales and marketing need to be together?
26:07
Well, how do you like to pair people coming in?
26:09
Yeah. And it can be.
26:10
It can be different every, every time as well and for every
26:14
company. And what we see is we're seeing
26:16
more hubs created around certain skill sets, right?
26:20
So obviously in the Bay Area, it's a lot of engineering and
26:23
product and then you might actually see.
26:25
And so I'm talking more offices and hubs than I am necessary
26:28
neighborhoods inside of the buildings, which I'll come on
26:31
to. But Salt Lake City is a
26:32
fantastic place to put customer success, for example.
26:36
So we're seeing a lot, a lot of that happening really focusing
26:41
around particular regions and the niche in that region inside
26:45
the office. It's what you'd expect.
26:46
It's HR, finance, legal kind of being together where they've got
26:51
a little bit more security and and privacy.
26:53
And then it's go to market teams being together.
26:56
And what we are seeing as well is there being, you know,
26:59
leaders wanting to be on the shop floor more and more as
27:03
well. So you know, leaders, if you're,
27:06
if you're SAB to be SAS AI founder, you're wanting to be on
27:10
the floor with your product team, with your engineering
27:12
team, very much like Zuckerberg is in, in their open plan kind
27:16
of spaces as well. So yeah, lots of congregating
27:19
around different departments. One of the cool things you can
27:21
do in cadence is you can create teams, you can follow the
27:24
cadences of people that matter to you.
27:27
So Ryan, you might plot your cadence of when you're going to
27:30
be in, in cadence all syncs through calendar.
27:33
And so when you're in town, I get smart suggestions of, hey,
27:36
Ryan's going to be in today, you might want to make sure that
27:38
you're in. And so, yeah, we kind of with
27:41
AI, we try and map all that out and make sure that we're being
27:45
as helpful as possible. Yeah, that makes sense.
27:49
I mean, if you don't have engineering and product together
27:52
at least occasionally, they're going to start hating each other
27:55
real quick. The same with sales and
27:57
marketing. You know, it's it's always turns
27:59
into that Spider Man meme with A3 Spider Man and they're all
28:02
pointing at each other, you know, like having people in the
28:06
same meat space so they can just get on as friends is going to be
28:10
really important. You kind of you need like a a
28:12
bond outside of work because obviously work gets stressful.
28:16
Yeah, I, I think it's OK. I think some of the best sales
28:19
and marketing teams I've had, you know, for example, and from
28:22
friends at other companies, you know, heat in the kitchen is not
28:25
a bad thing as well. Like they should be at each
28:27
other a little bit. Agreed.
28:30
I love it. You know, some things you're,
28:32
you're telling me it's kind of sticking with me like of this
28:34
being like maybe larger pursuit, like, OK, we're optimizing
28:37
workspaces, but like, how does this make people stop quitting
28:41
smoking cigarettes gives people a better relationship with their
28:43
wife, gives a better relationship with their husband
28:46
and their children. You know, I, I've said it before
28:48
that like I will die feeling a successful man, largely the way
28:53
that we are able to raise our kids now, not that they're gone
28:56
and raised, but you know, they're 16 and 18.
28:59
I feel like what their childhood is gone.
29:01
I'm going to start bawling if I talk about it.
29:04
But largely that's because because I was able to, to create
29:08
businesses and my wife could stay home with the kids.
29:11
Then we had that kind of relationship and experience
29:13
where the kids were always close to me and always close to my
29:17
wife. And like how important that is
29:19
truly, it's, it's, it's my greatest accomplishment before
29:22
and after everything else, you know, So I think I agree with
29:25
you, which is to say that like, if you solve this function,
29:28
especially around families, like the, the, the dividends echo
29:32
through generations, not to be, you know.
29:35
It does, it does and and you, you are of the ability where I
29:40
imagine you're you were fortunate enough for whatever
29:42
the circumstances might have been where you're able to create
29:45
and design some of that like and not everyone's that fortunate.
29:48
And so if we can, if we can help leaders create environments
29:53
where outcomes matter more than performative inputs, if we can
29:58
build that sense of trust, yeah, I think, I think generations
30:03
will be changed. And it is fascinating as well.
30:06
And there's already data supporting one of our investors
30:09
is a professor at Stanford called Nick Bloom.
30:11
He's kind of the global authority on remote and future
30:14
of work. And there's some data now
30:16
reporting purporting that if you have work from home, you're much
30:20
more likely to start repopulating your country as
30:25
well. And so I think, and it's
30:27
actually quite staggering, I think it's a third extra baby
30:30
per family that is has working from home in their cadence.
30:36
So, you know, whereas we're all thinking in the West and even in
30:39
the Far East as well about particularly in the Far East,
30:41
governments are looking at working from home as part of
30:44
population regrowth. I got a problem with that.
30:49
I mean, what? You're not repopulating the
30:51
earth on company time, are you? Come on, people.
30:54
If you get your if you get your work done.
30:57
Make sure you punch out first all.
30:59
Right. And you're smoking for
31:00
something, you're having smoking break a moment ago.
31:02
So, and I'll leave it there. Amazing.
31:07
So you, you guys have been meteor, meteor growth, you know,
31:10
looks like from what I can see, you know, you've raised about,
31:13
you know, 35 million in three rounds.
31:16
You have giant enterprise customers.
31:20
It, it and you mentioned the pivot, and it's probably worth
31:23
mentioning because it was a pretty gosh darn dramatic pivot.
31:27
You went from hardware to software, completely unrelated
31:30
categories. So take us back to the, the, the
31:34
when you kind of had this idea, and I'm sure you, you've told
31:37
the story a lot. So maybe I'll just bring it up
31:39
to speed that you had Chargeify was the original company, which
31:43
is a wireless charging infrastructure pandemic sent
31:47
revenue basically to 0 at that point.
31:50
And then what happened? Yeah.
31:53
And some of it's cool story, I mean, some of some of as you
31:55
know, some of the best companies that come from pivots like we're
31:58
blessed that one of the Co founders of Slack is an
32:01
investor. And and and their business was a
32:04
pivot from a computer game company.
32:06
And their previous business that Stuart and Cal funded founded
32:09
together was it was Flickr, if you remember, the photo sharing
32:13
app Yahoo acquired, which was again a pivot from a computer
32:17
game. So some of the best businesses,
32:19
I think come out of these moments in the fire and and
32:23
pivot. Yeah, So 2013 I founded this
32:26
business called Chargerfly, which is a wireless charging
32:28
business. So think of coffee shops,
32:30
restaurants, hotels having little wireless charging parks
32:34
built into tables. We built a network of those all
32:38
over the place. We particularly focus on offices
32:41
towards our later years of that business.
32:43
And so Accenture and Octa and people like that had them in
32:46
their meeting room tables, but then Accenture had our wireless
32:49
charges on their desks, in their hop desks.
32:52
And they said, hey, when we put our wireless charges on these
32:55
desks, like we want to recognize who it is.
32:58
We want to recognize that when Ryan puts his phone on wireless
33:01
charger on desk 39 and floor 52 in Hudson Yards in New York,
33:07
that it checked him into that hot desk and we then knew who
33:10
was there on that floor. We knew who was around him when
33:12
he puts his phone on a meeting room charger and recognized him
33:16
and check him into this slot. So that was our business.
33:18
We're trying to build Cisco network Management, but for
33:21
wireless power. And we had some intellectual
33:24
property that we like to say, Ryan, from phones to drones.
33:27
So we had phones, tablets, laptops, electric vehicles.
33:31
It's really cool. The new cyber taxi charges
33:33
wirelessly. Pull it up over a wireless
33:35
charging pad and the whole thing charges.
33:37
And then many of the new drones, you don't plug them in, you land
33:40
them on charges and they and they charge wirelessly.
33:43
So we want it to be network infrastructure for that.
33:46
Fast forward to 2020, I just moved my wife and three kids
33:49
under 5 out to the Bay Area. I was out here a week, a month
33:52
or so for four years, 3 or 4 years prior to that, we had HPE,
33:57
Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Intel were big investors at the
33:59
time. Four months after moving here,
34:03
lockdown happens and our public infrastructure business isn't
34:07
really doing anything anymore because no one's in public, let
34:10
alone needing public infrastructure.
34:12
And so, yeah, Ryan, we had customers.
34:14
I remember 1 hotel in Manhattan, they said, hey, we don't know if
34:18
we're going to be in business anymore, let alone need wireless
34:21
charges for our bedside tables. I so sorry, we've just bought
34:25
1000 units, but we're going to RIP up this purchase order.
34:29
And so I was like, OK, we're fortunate enough to go into the
34:33
pandemic with a fair amount of runway.
34:35
We had about 18 months of cash and we had one company, another
34:40
company in New York actually come to us and said, hey, we're
34:43
looking at your wireless charges.
34:45
We were looking at your wireless charge for all of our hot desks.
34:47
And you showed us this really cool like floor plan that you
34:50
manage all these wireless charges on.
34:52
You can tell which ones are in use, etcetera.
34:54
This company said Fortune 50 company, they said, hey, we're
34:57
going to, we're going to reduce the number of offices we have in
35:01
Manhattan. We're going to go from three
35:02
buildings to 1 building lockdown happens the end of March, right?
35:07
March 2020. This was in May 2020.
35:09
This customer said, hey, we go from three buildings to one.
35:12
We think this whole hybrid thing is going to take off and we're
35:15
going to reduce the number of desks we have by 49%.
35:18
Can we use your technology to make to manage our offices?
35:22
We don't want your hardware, but can't we use the software?
35:26
And I was like, man, this is 8 years, tons of patterns, 17 and
35:29
a half, $1,000,000 raised of private of venture capital.
35:34
I'd lived and breathed wireless charge.
35:35
I was on the standards body committee for goodness sake, for
35:38
wireless charging personally. So this is all I've done the
35:43
last eight years. And desk cooking software sounds
35:48
really boring. I'm a deep tech founder.
35:51
I don't want to do this. But what I was fascinated about
35:56
was the Tam. There's a ton of desks in
36:00
offices all over the world. I was fascinated by the fact
36:05
that we were now a painkiller. We weren't just a vitamin and
36:09
our wireless charging tech really was.
36:11
At the end of the day, as much as we would have loved it to be
36:13
otherwise, it was a vitamin. It wasn't a painkiller.
36:15
Like it was a very much a nice to have and all of a sudden we
36:17
had the opportunity to provide a must have need to have, which is
36:21
easier to sell, as you know. And then thirdly, I was
36:24
fascinated by all the moving pieces of what would now become
36:27
hybrid work. Who should be where when?
36:30
What happens with this real estate?
36:31
How do I load balance it? How do I make sure that I can
36:34
get AB and C in town at the right time?
36:36
If everybody's autonomous, how does that work?
36:39
And so there's enough moving pieces to make the technical
36:42
side of me fascinated by the challenge.
36:44
And then the gritty founder side of me loved, loved the Tam.
36:49
Yeah, that's really interesting. I've never heard that metaphor
36:52
before, but I totally get it. You know, one's a vitamin and
36:55
one's a painkiller. Like, you know what, when it
36:59
really comes down to it and when I think about products, I I love
37:02
to simplify it down to like, what did, what did caveman need?
37:07
You know, they, they didn't even know what a vitamin was, but
37:10
like, they definitely know when they're in pain and would do
37:12
anything to solve it. And this is 1 particularly right
37:15
at that time where everyone's like looking at their leases or
37:17
they're looking at their options because they're like, Oh my
37:19
gosh, you know, we're paying $1,000,000 annually in in rent
37:24
and zero people are there, you know?
37:27
Yeah, Facebook paid $170 million to get out of an office in
37:31
London for its like it was staggering what was happening.
37:35
And so we were like, yeah, there is a painkiller we can sell
37:38
here. And so, yeah, we made the pivot
37:39
from a A channel sales LED hardware business to B to B SAS
37:47
business that sold direct. Amazing.
37:50
And you know going to market at that time like what was what was
37:54
traction like? Did did you kind of grow word of
37:56
mouth pretty quickly? Oh, isn't it was nuts.
37:59
We'd wake up with HubSpot, sort of HubSpot full of leads every
38:02
day. And it was, it was.
38:04
And we hadn't even rebranded yet, but that was something we'd
38:07
never felt, Ryan, like everyone said, oh, you'll get you.
38:11
You've got product market fit or you'll feel product market fit.
38:15
We felt it. It was a pull and we were, I
38:18
like to say we were selling Figma as in like we were selling
38:21
designs of our product on Figma because it was like we have to
38:24
show what we are building because we had people knocking
38:27
on the door and we knew where to click on the Figma to demo to
38:30
make sure that everything worked it.
38:32
And obviously we made sure that we delivered on time when it
38:35
came to the actual deployment. But yeah, the demand was there.
38:40
People were searching desk booking software like that was
38:43
the pain. No one was looking for workplace
38:45
operations, people looking for their pain.
38:48
And so yeah, traction was there. We, we grew, we grew up really
38:53
quickly and we grew with SMB to start with SMBA, little bit of
38:58
mid market, but lots of SMB. And over the last 18 months
39:02
we've really gone up market. We're almost 8X year over year
39:06
in terms of the amount of enterprise logos that we have in
39:09
in the company. And so and that's where we
39:12
brought on, I remember we brought on Frederick Caressed a
39:15
Co founder and CEO Okta. He invested in Cadence a few
39:18
years ago and he said, hey Dan, it's going to take quite a while
39:21
for us to get the 100 million ARR.
39:23
If we keep doing 5K ACVS, should we get upmarket?
39:28
Yeah, I think, I think we should, right.
39:30
And so yeah, we've been aggressively going upmarket the
39:32
last last 18 months. What does that mean exactly?
39:36
Like how? How do you what what changes as
39:39
far as Rev OPS to get upstream? And in terms of well,
39:44
particularly around product is what we've noticed that is
39:46
needed to change the most. We'd won a lot of deals because
39:50
of the the look and feel of the product.
39:54
It's super elegant, very modern, very design LED.
39:59
And as we've gone up market, I've been responding to more
40:01
RFPs, there's been a lot more tactical, hey, we need to build
40:05
move management or we need to build what's called scenario
40:08
planning. So I've got headcount for 3000
40:11
new people in London next year. How do I fit everybody in?
40:14
Should I renew that lease? So we've we've found these like
40:17
more. Kind of what I call chaos to
40:21
order, like how do I create order out of chaos features that
40:25
need to be created as we've gone up market a little bit like your
40:28
caveman, they don't need fluff in the enterprise, they need
40:31
pain Med killers. And so that's what we found.
40:35
I think it's been the biggest move is how much investment
40:37
we've had to put in building out the product.
40:41
So it is a unified workplace operations platform rather than
40:47
just really pretty space booking.
40:49
That's been a big change. And then of course on the go to
40:53
market side is hiring enterprise AES that know what they're
40:56
doing. I it's a different thing to take
40:58
down a Boeing or a Mars or a Willis Tower Watson or whoever,
41:05
you know, we've had the fortune of working with this last 1218
41:08
months. It's just a different, it's a
41:10
different motion. So learning that, learning how
41:13
to forecast for that learning length of time, learning what a
41:18
land strategy looks like, then quickly followed by expand in
41:21
that account. So yeah, lots of learning as
41:25
we've gone up market for sure. You bet those Enterprise A ES
41:29
with, if you go back and hire them now, would you hire
41:32
somebody for the experience to build out the process or
41:35
somebody who just has those relationships already baked in?
41:39
And I think you got a higher for tenacity to start with over and
41:44
above networking relationships. The thing about hiring in the US
41:48
as well, and forgive me, Ryan, but you know, everybody, every
41:51
AE that you hire in the US is going to tell you they're a
41:53
rainmaker regardless whether they are or not.
41:56
So I, I learned the hard way like many European founders as
42:00
well, but that's not always the case when you're hiring American
42:04
AES. And so I probably trade and
42:06
discount the, the network piece more than more so than most
42:10
these days. But I learned that the hard way
42:12
back in 2014, 2015. So no, I, I look for quote
42:17
retainment, both the head of thinker Ryan and can I, can I,
42:22
can I reference check quote retainment from someone else
42:27
that that's worked with that person previously?
42:31
Amazing. Are you ready for the Lightning
42:34
Round? I know what to expect, but let's
42:36
go, let's go. OK, cool.
42:42
What does California do better than England?
42:44
And what does England do better than California, specifically
42:47
that state? California does optimism 100
42:53
times better than the UKUK still has, as much as I love the
42:58
place, a tall poppy syndrome where it cuts down anything that
43:02
that raises above surface level, above the pack.
43:05
And so there is so much more optimism here.
43:09
There is a culture of giving first as well.
43:13
I remember raising when we had some angels come in on our seed
43:18
round when we pivoted the business.
43:20
There's like, and these are founders of Unicorn companies
43:23
saying if there is room for me in the round, I would love to be
43:28
in. It's not you're lucky to have my
43:30
capital. It's if there is room for me,
43:33
I'd love to be in. And so that sense of optimism if
43:36
we're talking about business rather than anything else I'd
43:39
say is, is the big difference business wise UK versus US.
43:47
What I've realized in the UK is that there is, there's a lot
43:52
more people in what I'd call like the top quartile than I've
43:56
recognized here in the US, at least working in California, is
44:00
that there's a lot more people, maybe the top third of like
44:03
quality of craftsmanship, quality of work.
44:07
And quite honestly, from what I've experienced, IQ, what I
44:10
think I've experienced there in the US is the top like decile is
44:15
insanely high. And so the number of times I've
44:19
got on with, you know, fortunate enough to be backed by some
44:22
amazing folks and I've got on schools with founders and CEOs
44:27
of public companies here and a 30 minute call and I've I've
44:32
struggled to keep up, you know, my early days and I never
44:36
experienced that in the UKI didn't ever experience, and
44:38
perhaps I wasn't there yet long enough in in work, but I'm
44:43
experiencing that more regularly here.
44:45
The just the quality of the top percentile is is extraordinary.
44:52
And I think that's because it attracts a lot of those, a lot
44:54
of those go getters to be here. But, but the general Joe on the
44:57
street I think is probably be told off for this, but I think
45:02
he's of a of a higher quality in business at least.
45:05
In England, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, these things are
45:10
like, it's like again and again, you know, you have California
45:14
has the highest, highest 1% boy, but that loan 1% is something
45:17
else. Yeah.
45:19
And that that is what I'm saying is like the wow, that 1%, like
45:23
I, I feel outclassed a lot of I'm like, wow, that they are, I
45:27
aspire to be like that. I didn't have as many of those
45:30
experiences as like, and maybe that's something unique to the
45:32
valley as well, right. But I didn't experience that on
45:36
the frequency that I do here. But the average person I do
45:40
think is, again, this is just a generalization I've noticed to
45:45
be slightly better in terms of like, if you're not talking
45:48
about business. I'm really miss banter in the
45:52
UKI miss the dry sense of humor. California does not do that
45:57
well. Californians take themselves far
45:59
too seriously. I love them to bits.
46:02
But yeah, they take themselves very seriously.
46:05
Yeah, very sensitive out West, you know and they, I don't think
46:07
there anybody argue with you because that top 1%, they're all
46:10
Indians. So we get it.
46:15
No, I'm just I'm teasing of course.
46:17
Nice. Why is founder LED marketing
46:20
important to you? Why are you out here doing this?
46:24
Yeah, building in public has been huge for us.
46:27
Like we go to events now and and people are asking where I am, or
46:31
more importantly they're asking where my colleague Dave Cans is
46:34
here is a big influencer in our space.
46:37
And so we've built quite a following on on LinkedIn in
46:42
particular, the LinkedIn algorithm loves talking about
46:45
the future of work and return to office, as you might imagine.
46:48
So we've been able to really kind of news Jack a lot of
46:51
headlines and and play to our favour building public masses.
46:55
I think people want to believe in the brand.
46:57
They want to see that the product staying new and getting
47:00
better. And I think the founder kind of
47:01
can encapsulate that and it's working.
47:04
I mean, some of the enterprise logos that we've we've signed
47:07
this year have come from, hey, we saw you on LinkedIn or you
47:11
cold reached out on LinkedIn, one of the biggest neo banks in
47:15
the in Europe and signed with us.
47:18
It was our biggest deal ever at the time, might still even be
47:21
our biggest deal now. In end of Q2, cold outbound from
47:27
a Rep still ramping closed within 9 weeks and we replaced a
47:33
competitor that been there for 10 years.
47:36
And I don't think that would have happened without as much
47:39
building in public reps that we had, we had we'd gotten in.
47:44
Amazing. That's so you're seeing it as
47:47
like being a differentiator between competitors for sure,
47:50
where they're like, oh, I like, I'm a damn guy.
47:53
It's massive how many of our private equity backed competitor
47:55
CE OS are building in public, but they're on that many.
48:00
Is there that's that's the the bull case?
48:03
Is there a bear case to building in public?
48:06
Do you feel you're vulnerable? No, I mean I have had I've had
48:10
trolls and stuff in the past, which is not friendly, but it's
48:15
not been that pub about building so much product wise.
48:21
No, I think you've got to be obviously careful about what
48:24
you're doing Art of War wise, like how much you sharing that
48:27
competitors might see how much you're not sharing.
48:29
What are you? What are you secretly building
48:31
that you're going to do a big got you a moment on later as you
48:34
kind of building on the new and you kind of 0 to 1 product.
48:38
So I think there's there is there is an art to what you
48:41
share and what you don't share. But now I think most people want
48:45
for the most Part 1 founders to succeed.
48:50
You know, it's, there's a lot of people discouraging people to be
48:54
founders right now because of how hard it is.
48:56
And it's incredibly hard. I think Elon calls it chewing
48:59
glass and staring into the abyss, right, Is what it feels
49:01
like to be to be a founder a lot of the time.
49:04
But I think people love that. I follow a guy called Howard.
49:09
He's building a wonderful company called Rome, and he's
49:12
very public about how he's building the company, what he's
49:15
sharing. And it makes me want him to win
49:18
even more. Yeah.
49:20
Totally cool. This audience loves business
49:26
ideas. Then they like the juice, much
49:28
like Greg Eisenberg. What is the best idea you could
49:34
come up with to capitalize on the massive amount of commercial
49:38
real estate that's coming up for grabs in the next couple of
49:41
years? So.
49:46
This is where your editors will pause What's So what's the best
49:52
idea I've had to capitalize on the amount of commercial real
49:55
estate that's coming up for grabs?
50:02
27th floor flea market. How about that?
50:07
Yeah, yeah, Still. So Charlie Munger, Charlie
50:14
Munger actually looked at this in quite a lot of detail and he
50:17
looked at can you try? And this has come up in San
50:20
Francisco a lot. We just had the slowest return
50:22
to office of any major city in the US.
50:25
Can you turn corporate real estate officers into anything
50:28
else? There's been a whole lot about
50:30
can you residentify and make them residential spaces?
50:34
The truth is, you, you probably can't.
50:36
They're just not set up to. If you think about a floor plate
50:38
of earth, high rise, it's glass all the way around the outside.
50:42
But you're going to have very long and narrow rooms in your
50:45
apartment if that's going to be the case, right?
50:47
And so Charlie Munger said, hey, is there anybody that would be
50:50
OK with that? And he said students.
50:52
So like, can you actually pack a whole lot more student
50:55
accommodation into downtown cities?
50:57
And I don't think that's a bad thing.
50:59
Some of the Nick Bloom at Stanford professor there calls
51:04
it the donor effect where cities like San Jose that I'm very
51:08
close to, they are like ghost towns.
51:11
Now, even though Zoom and Adobe and many others are
51:13
headquartered there, there is no mix of residential versus
51:17
offices. It's pretty much all offices.
51:20
And so there's no incentive for people to come in, stay late,
51:24
watch a game, go to a bar, etcetera, because it's
51:27
completely not residential. And so the biggest opportunity
51:30
to get to your question, Ryan, is actually can mayors of cities
51:35
reimagine downtown because business parks and those donut
51:41
cities are going to be ghost towns very quickly.
51:45
Yeah, totally. Yeah, it's already happened in,
51:50
oh, it's happening everywhere, right.
51:51
But there it was interesting that a couple of big high rises
51:54
in Denver were sold for like $3,000,000 when like 8 years
51:58
prior were sold for like 120 million.
52:02
You know, another shout out to another buddy of mine who in
52:06
Denver where we have a kind of a famous cash register building on
52:09
our skyline and he took, he took over a lease on the the highest
52:15
floor before it goes round. So, you know, gorgeous, I mean,
52:18
like views of, of the Rocky Mountains, views of the plains,
52:22
unbelievable. And he basically picked up like
52:25
the last three years of like a 10 year lease for a dollar And,
52:30
and all of the, the office furniture too.
52:32
Just somebody was like bailing and had to sign it off the, the
52:36
liability. So, you know, there's, there's
52:38
deals and opportunities out there all over the place, you
52:41
know, and it'll it'll be interesting to see because it
52:45
rarely has such like prime cool real estate, you know, been able
52:49
to be this affordable, like orders of magnitude discounted.
52:53
So it'll be very interesting to see you sell a cadence for a
53:02
billion dollars. What do you do the next day?
53:05
Next day, I'm probably recovering from the night before
53:08
a little bit. I'd guess to start with the next
53:14
day. I'm probably saying a lot of
53:15
thank yous. I'm probably saying a lot of
53:17
thank yous to people that believed in our Angel rounds.
53:19
People earliest employees, wanted to make sure they're
53:22
fully looked after, the investors that backed us
53:25
earliest rounds. I think I'm saying a lot of
53:27
thank yous. Yeah, I'm probably having a
53:31
massage to chill out a little bit as well.
53:33
But yeah, that's probably what I'm doing.
53:35
If I'm still in the business, I'm continuing to crack on.
53:38
If not, I'm probably I, I, I already would know what I'm
53:41
going to be doing next. I would have had that figured
53:43
out in terms of what start up I want to go and do next.
53:46
Yeah, I, I love backing founders as well, like being here and
53:51
being around the block a little bit now 36, but started building
53:54
companies very early. I've, I've been fortunate enough
53:58
to be mentored by, you know, founder of TechCrunch, for
54:01
example, a meeting guy called Keith Teer.
54:03
And so I got a pretty good idea what investment decks work, what
54:06
investment decks don't work. And so I think I'd probably be
54:09
helping founders and building building something again myself.
54:16
What should we know about wireless charging right now?
54:18
What's going on? What's going new?
54:21
So I know you don't ask me. I haven't looked for a while and
54:26
I'm excited about wireless charging for electric vehicles.
54:29
Like I think that's really cool. I think we're going to need it
54:31
for autonomous fleet size in a way mode yesterday, actually
54:33
doing an interview in a way mode yesterday.
54:35
And, and that thing still needs to be plugged in at night and
54:38
there's someone that is doing that.
54:40
And so wireless charges, I think it's going to be a key to to
54:43
autonomy. I don't think they're going to
54:45
be in our roads or anything like that, but there's enough parking
54:48
lots, there's enough, there's enough driveways around that.
54:53
So yeah, I think autonomous wireless charging for autonomy
54:57
enablement, it's really, really cool.
55:00
Cool, last question here, having an English accent seems like it
55:04
would be performance enhancing in America.
55:06
Do you have any fun stories around that?
55:11
People say that a lot. I don't.
55:15
And the honest truth is I don't know any different, right?
55:19
I've definitely made the mistakes though, Ryan, Like I
55:22
remember being board meetings and I'm like, OK, let's put
55:25
this, let's put the next date in the diary right now.
55:28
And people like what? What are you putting a date in
55:31
your diary for? You mean like calendar?
55:33
Are you getting out your secret notebook that teenage girls
55:36
might have about board meetings? So, so yeah, that I've made a
55:40
few kind of faux pas like that is probably the most thing.
55:43
But if you say it with confidence and in a British
55:45
accent, then it can pretty much work.
55:47
It's kind of why I did it the other day.
55:49
I said I I was on a cool. I used the word depository
55:55
rather than repository, but no one blinked.
55:57
I was like, they got away with that, that one.
55:59
So yeah, we'll see. Hopefully my hopefully it serves
56:02
my two sons well later in life being out here.
56:06
I love it. Were there any euphemisms from
56:08
America that made you pause? Fanny pack Fanny packs One is
56:13
odd. There's been a feat buoy.
56:17
Rather than say we would call a buoy a boy, we'd start.
56:21
That's we find that one strange. When we got here, someone said,
56:27
have we acclimated yet? We're like, have you just
56:29
mispronounced acclimatize? So there's been a few things
56:33
that and we had quite a lot of fun with it.
56:34
Like I, I'm definitely on the hey at cadence.
56:38
We use American English. I'm definitely unlike the let's
56:41
be on that. Let's be on the side with the
56:43
most people as much as you know, you're licensing our language.
56:48
But no, I I love it here and I've got a lot to thank this
56:53
country for. Amazing.
56:55
Want to give a shout out It's cadence.co That's Cadence with
56:59
AK. Also want to give a shout out to
57:02
stopthetraffic.org which is 2FS and AK at theend.org.
57:07
Best they are working preventing humane human trafficking before
57:13
it happens. I know that this is an
57:14
organization near and dear to your heart.
57:16
I was actually just educated a lot about this by Tim Tebow of
57:19
all people on a podcast he's doing.
57:23
He's doing a lot of this work too.
57:24
And it's it's pretty staggering and scary, like how widespread
57:28
human trafficking and just slavery is in the in the world
57:31
right now, something I was blind to.
57:33
So I want to give them a shout out.
57:35
Anything to add first? Bonkers.
57:37
Now it's been my wife Alert me to it about 15 years ago and
57:41
we've been supporting as a family some of the anti
57:45
trafficking stuff for the last little while.
57:47
And yeah, they're a Cadence customer now, which we're very
57:50
delighted about too. Incredible.
57:53
And that's again cadence.co, you mentioned LinkedIn, what's
57:56
what's is that the best place for people to connect with you
57:59
online? Yeah, gox.com/danlayton.
58:03
Amazing. Dan, thanks so much for coming
58:05
on the show. So what you do, Ryan?
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