Aligning Goals and Action: Streamlining Growth

David's Notes:

I was a guest in the Modern CTO Podcast hosted by Joel Beasley we had a great conversation about aligning goals and actions and how it helps businesses grow. But, What does that mean? Every company has goals that they would like to reach, to do so their actions must reflect their desires and goals. Aligning them is a way to pave the road to meeting those goals as effectively as possible. The importance of this cannot be understated, it is something that can make or break a burgeoning company.

Here are the key moments from today's topic on aligning goals and actions:

00:00 - Introductions, talk about LA CTO Forum

01:59 - David speaks about working with Disney

06:19 - David talks about the Spotify model

07:49 - David talks about Interna and his personal experience

09:14 - Joel talks about hosting podcasts and his own experiences and evolution

11:57 - David talks about working with Lynda.com

16:36 - David and Joel talk about proper recruiting

19:00 - David and Joel talk about motivation and drive and leadership training

Transcript:

Joel Beasley:

Well, man, I am so glad to have you here. I have been aware of the LA CTO Forum forever. So many times I went to California, I was like, "I'm going to come and stop by," and then I didn't. It's been this elusive thing in my mind. Are you the founder or the president of it?

David Subar:

No. I'm on the board of director, so that's one of my hats.

Joel:

When I saw you were a part of that, I was like, "Oh, finally, I'm getting to see someone [chuckles] from that organization." Super excited that you could come on the show and hang out with us.

David:

Awesome. Yes, I've been following you, so got a mutual admiration society going on.

Joel::

Nice. Tell me a little bit about what it is that you do.

David:

Aside from being on the board of the LA CTO Forum, I run a company called Interna. What we care about is product and engineering and how to make them successful, how to make them effective. You could think about the lean startup model but actually, a lot of people who don't know how to do it, don't do it well. How do you build fast, ship fast, get in the market, hear what the market really wanted to iterate?

We've been doing this over eight years, helping companies from small startups, have several unicorns, worked with The Walt Disney Company, but it's all about what's the right process, who are the right people, what's the right org design?

Joel:

What did you get to do at Disney?

David:

Disney was an interesting story. I was coaching with Disney at the ABC television group. This was my project, there are several of us. This was my project and then he left and I was working with the EVP, product management engineering, ABC television group. I was working with the president after the EVP left.

At first, it was how to make those groups more effective, but the president asked me a very important question. He said, "What did you tell the CTO and what should I know?" I said to him, "Well, I can tell you what I told the CTO and he was being very effective at implementing that stuff. I can tell you to make product in engineering here about 10% better, or we could talk about something that's going to be a lot harder. A lot harder thing might have a much better outcome, but I'm going to tell you, it's going to be a lot harder." I said, "Which do you want to have a conversation about?"

He said, "Let's have a conversation about the second one." I was like, "Great. That's awesome." I said, "In the first case, 10% better means Netflix will kill you slowly. A lot harder means you might win or you might lose and I don't know, but you might win." I said, "A lot harder thing is your organizational design, it's fundamentally broken. The guy who ran Disney Channel made a lot of revenue off of cable, but he liked his technology group because it was sexy. The woman who ran ABC News, same thing. Over the air, a lot of revenue got most of her attention. Her digital group is sexy. The guy who ran ABC in prime time, the same thing."

I said, "Until you take those three groups and bring them together, and make them one digital group because they do the same thing, your groups will never be great. You've an org design problem, it's not in your architecture, which sometimes you've problems, it's not your personnel. Sometimes you see problems, that's not in your process. Your org design is fundamentally broken, which means you got to rip these three groups away from these executives that have it. They're going to feel really sad and you're going to change your bonus structure, and you're going to fundamentally change your org design. That's what I'm telling you got to do in order for your group to be great."

By the way, this guy's name is Bruce. I said, "Bruce, I can't report to you. The Walt Disney Company's organized by channels to marketplace. Parks and resorts reports to the CEO, it's Bob Iger. Studios reports to CEO. This is another challenge to marketplace. They said, "This got to report to the CEO," and then they did it, and it became Disney Plus.

Now I don't want to say that I was the only person who told The Walt Disney Company, they needed to do this. There's a lot of smart people there, but this was the conversation we had. Sometimes a problem with product management engineering is the architecture is wrong. Sometimes you're not running the right agile methodology or you're running it poorly. Sometimes, you don't have the right people in the room, this was an org design problem.

Joel:

First of all, next time, I'm having problems with the Disney Plus app, I'm calling you.

[laughter]

Joel:

The second thing is, I think it's interesting what you mentioned about teams because when I do talks publicly, one of the questions I get the most is ultimately the person's trying to justify the structure of the team or try to change it because this fancy word of the day, they use two pizzas to feed their team and this one they use squads and whatever it is. I find myself having the experience because I am an engineer, but I'm also equally an entrepreneur. I find myself just constantly telling them that, "Hey, your line of business and what your customers need dictates the shape of your organization. Don't try to copy somebody else just because they wrote a book about it."

David:

That's exactly right. Organizational design is like software architecture. You build it for a problem. You build processes to solve a problem. Don't just copy somebody like two pizza teams? Great concept, works in a lot of places, doesn't work everywhere. Great for Amazon, may or may not work for you.

Joel:

Yes. What did you do with Spotify?

David:

I didn't work with Spotify, but I knew some people there and I was giving a presentation about different processes and ways people worked together. I was talking about the Spotify model. I said, "The Spotify model failed," and there was somebody in the audience and he said, "You're wrong. It didn't fail. As a matter I worked at Spotify, it worked."

He said the same thing you just said. He said, "We designed the Spotify model for a particular strategy we had, a particular moment in time. When Spotify started out, it was a small business without a lot of revenue, without a lot of customers and we knew there were going to be competitors who had a lot more money than we had and we needed to be able to innovate very quickly. We did this squad model. We had a bunch of independent teams that were empowered, but not aligned because we needed to iterate very, very quickly. We put together what's called the Spotify model and we did it. It got us to the next stage and then it failed. We purposely iterated on it because it got us to where we needed to get to. We went to another model which was appropriate for where Spotify was at that time."

The learning there was exactly what you just said, which is to pick the right model for the right problem.

Joel:

It's so important. You get to do this all the time? You get to go talk with companies, look at their models, analyze them and then provide insight?

David:

Yes. There's four things we do. One is we'll just do the analysis and say, "Here are some stuff you're doing well. Here are some stuff you might want to do differently [unintelligible 00:07:14]," a diagnosis and a prescription. Some companies will just have us do that. Some companies will say, "We have a CTO or a chief product officer because those are the two things we care about. Can you help coach them through that?"

The third thing somebody just say, "We don't have somebody, we're just hitting growth. The stuff that got us here isn't going to get us to the next part, where we keep putting capital in here and we don't think we're going to get to the next stage. We will be interim executives and help get to the part, into the next stage and help hire someone behind. Then we do diligence on DC firm for the CBOs and get you [unintelligible 00:07:50] transactions." Those are the four things we do. We help companies with those things.

Joel:

You love your job, you love what you do?

David:

Love the job. I've been CTO, I've been chief product officer, all of us have. This is the best job I've ever had.

Joel:

Oh yes. Why do you think that is?

David:

Look, here's what jives me. I like learning, I love technology, I like meeting people and I want to do something that has an effect on the world.

Joel:

Yes.

David:

I created a job for me to help me do what I wanted to do, simultaneously creating value for somebody else. That's the metric. It's got to be like, you got to love it and someone's got to go like, "Dude, I wish I'd see [unintelligible 00:08:30] more."

Joel:

Oh yes. Look, this is what I did. [chuckles] It's crazy. Podcast host in high school was not a thing. It was not a job thing you could do. It's so fascinating what has transpired because I wanted it to be big, I wanted to do something like great and big and whatnot, but it was a totally different idea. I thought I would meet some great people, have some relationships and end up being a CTO at a really large company or head of product at a really large company. That's what I thought the podcast would result in. I never thought that the podcast would result in being my job.

David:

Yes. You have impact. For me, we do stop and we have impact that feels good. People want to be associated with people that have impact. You do the same thing. I learned about you way before this conversation. I've known about you for a long time.

I've listened to the podcast. I know other people are listening about it. I've had conversations with other people about the podcast. It's great, it's great to go like, "Oh, I did something, and the impact and people care. I've made things better and by the way, people give me money for that."

Joel:

Yes. It's insane. It's so cool. [laughs]

David:

It's great. Your job in some ways is like mine.

Joel:

Exactly. For about a decade, I did something very similar, as just an independent consultant with a small team. As you're talking about mostly companies getting injections of capital and me helping rewrite their systems or build their teams and then leaving. One of the things I loved about that was getting to jump into an industry, learn all about it, do something useful there and then go into another industry.

When I realized this pattern, I thought of a couple of things. First off, early on in the podcast, I had interviewed some consultants or something from Deloitte or one of those larger consulting companies and I found out that's what that job is called. You don't have to have your own business, that's what that job is. I thought that was really interesting, but then I realized that I'm satisfying that need because one day I'm talking to people who make brain implants, the next day molecular beverage printers, then people that do all these different interesting things. Because I get to do it so often, it's like I could never go back to only getting one new one every year. [chuckles]

David:

No, that's absolutely right. We've worked with a company that does SAS service for clinical trials that help work clinical trials on COVID. We worked with Eli Lilly, Merck, and Sanofi, and help make that process fair. That's awesome. Worked with Lynda.com. We had an online learning, got sold to LinkedIn, lots and lots of different companies, interesting stuff.

Joel:

What was Lynda.com like?

David:

So fascinating. I'll tell you a Lynda story, so there is actually a Lynda.

Joel:

Oh, really?

David:

Yes. Lynda and Bruce. She's a lot like the logo, but she has three dimensions. She's actually RAGB as well. I got there and they were having trouble scaling. I was there about two weeks. I get this flame mail from Lynda, and she said, "This woman tried to unsubscribe from our marketing list and she's still getting marketing from us. WTF," except there was no abbreviation. It was in all caps.

I was like, "Lady, I just got here. I figure this out. All the things you need me to work on, your marketing list doesn't seem it's a real high priority, but whatever, your name's on the logo, I'll do it." It turned out there were two marketing lists and if you aren't subscribed for one, you're not subscribed for another, still feeling very trivial to me. I went to Lynda, I said, "There is two marketiing lists. They weren't integrated, we'll integrate them. How about we go like real product that people care about, but we'll get this fixed, don't worry." She said, "Great, get it fixed today." I was like, "Fine. We'll get it fixed today."

Really? I got other things like, do you really need me to work on? They were doing $75 million a year revenue. They were going 50% year over year. They had things to do and I said, "We'll get it done." I said, "Lynda, by the way, tell me, why do you care so much about this? What is the deal?" She went, "I read every email from everybody that emails us. I want to make sure we're building a great product."

She was no longer CEO, she had appointed a CEO. She wanted to make sure she understood her ecosystem. The users, the course creators, the people that bought it and they were also selling to corporations. She read every email. She was so concerned about value creation, she wanted to get the raw data. They built a great product.

I said, "I got the WTF message. I get why this matters to you," and guess what? We got it fixed that same day and we kept it and they sold for $1.4 billion, $1.2 billion. It was a big number.

I won't tell you what part Lynda got but Lynda did quite well on herself and did great, but it was because they cared so much about all the constituencies. The employees like one Christmas, everybody got a new laptop, everyone get that new MacBook. That's what Lynda was about. Linda was about, how do we create value for everybody that we touch?

Joel:

It's a good recipe, right?

David:

I have such respect for her. I went from like, "I can't believe why you really care about this this much," to like, "Okay, I completely get it."

Joel:

Now, are you the founder of the consulting company?

David:

Interna, yes. I'm the founder.

Joel:

Okay. You've got that perspective of things as well?

David:

That's exactly. It's all about like, "What are we here to do? We are here to help companies figure how to create value for their customers." Our engagements are only successful for coaching someone. Did we help them become a better CTO or chief product officer?" Yes or no. If it's no, what are we going to do about-- Like it's the whole agile process in retro. We have processes against everything. We run the processes and then we retro everything. How can we do better? Did we or did we not create value?

Joel:

I have an unrelated question to this conversation. It came up today. I have a friend who's a political consultant and he works on campaigns and he does things in the advertising space for campaigns through digital marketing. He was telling me his company is doing well, it's mostly him. He's got a couple of administrative assistants, but he was saying he's had a really tough time finding another him to also provide strategy and things of that nature to the customer, so he doesn't have to do every single customer, to scale his business beyond himself. You've done that with your consultancy, so I'm curious, how did you find those people?

David:

It's slow and hard. Also, I'm the board of the LA CTO Forum so we have 350 CTOs so I know a lot of people. People that were like, "Hey, I'm trying to figure out what to do next," or maybe they just jumped out of a job, who I respected and had some conversations with. Now, we've got a guy in London, we've got one in Toronto and there's one in Seattle and we got folks in LA. It was just word of mouth but it is a very rigorous process for us to interview you, very rigorous.

The first project, I will work on with you directly. I need to understand it's a value thing. The Lynda thing, it's like we create value for people and you got to be done with that. If you're just like, "Hey, I just want to do this and make some money and be out," so it's really hard. It's like everything else, it's 90% of your problems are recruit well, retain well, fire well. Because we have methodologies, you can learn what we do, but you can't learn-- I want to help people create some interesting stuff. That's got to be like a bit [unintelligible 00:16:25].

Joel:

Yes, you can't train personality or hunger.

David:

You can't.

Joel:

I lost a lot of money thinking you could.

[chuckling]

David:

That's right. Me, too. [unintelligible 00:16:34] you are a certain person, a person who starts modern CTO, that's not an average person who does that. You've got to be a particular kind of person. There is a saying, I remember what you said it. It was something like "A reasonable person conforms to the world around them. An unreasonable person expects the world to conform to them. Therefore, all significant gains are made by unreasonable people."

Joel:

100%. I heard something similar like that from Grant Cardone, a long time ago. He was just talking about, people would tell him he's unreasonable and he's like, "Absolutely." For me, I don't know, I'll put it like this. At my mom's funeral, they played the song, I Did It My Way. It runs in the family. I'm just extremely independent.

Hey, I wish I could have a job and work for somebody. That would be great but I just can't. I have to be doing what I want to do. I wasn't great at it for a long time. I made ends meet and there was ups and downs financially. You do it long enough-- It's been like 20 years. You do it long enough and you finally get it. Everyone says "The overnight success, 10 years." I'm like, "[unintelligible 00:17:48] it took me 20, [chuckles] but I still did it."

David:

That's also right. You've got to be cut for that mold and it's great. A lot of people aren't and that's fine. Everyone doesn't have to do this. The world needs lots and lots of different people. It's just this kind of person you are, this kind of person I am. My wife said the same thing to me that you just said, "You couldn't work for somebody else." I'm like, "Yes." I'm much better at doing this. I'm much better for the world doing this.

Joel:

No, that's a good point because some of the Tony Robbins-type motivational people, I had heard them talking about this several years ago, they said I'm going to butcher it. It's not about the money. The money is awesome when you get to that point where you have more than enough of it. He goes "But the actual thing that's rewarding or the actual thing that you will realize is more valuable is the person you have to become to get that money."

All money is just transacting by being valuable to one another. The people with the most money are arguably the most valuable people by that measure in a capitalistic society. I went from seeing somebody with a Lamborghini being like, I hate them, or a high-end Tesla like "What?" To my brain now goes to, "I wonder what they're doing for the world?" I wonder how have they been so useful that they can afford to spend $150,000 on a car? I'm curious now and so when I started to get curious versus being frustrated that I wasn't there yet or that when I had a new understanding of how the economy works and how people work within each other, that really helped me figure out that you just have to become a better person.

I don't super care-- It's cool, the podcast and everything. I don't care about the popularity aspect. In fact, I spend a lot of time trying to not think about how many people listen, but the person I had to become through the progress of doing this business-- When I started it, I was ignoring my wife and my firstborn. I did that for the first two years and then I saw a Christmas movie with this guy who was alone on Christmas Eve, and I decided I didn't want to be that guy. I adjusted how I ran my business and hiring people, firing people, being bold enough to fire people. You definitely get good at that when your choice is either you're not going to eat or you're going to eat.

Depending on you having the right people in the right positions on your team, depends if you have food or not, all these really, really, really hard things, they're fun for me. I like them. Somebody use this phrase and said, "You're a glutton for punishment, you like punishment." I do not like punishment. [chuckles] I'm not a fan of punishment at all. What I like is solving hard problems and the only way that you can really solve a hard problem is if you dive head first into it, because if you dip your toe in it a little bit and try to solve it, it is just not going to get done.

David: The world has had a lot of people trying to solve these problems so all the easy ways are done, all that's left are the hard things. By the way, you didn't get a Lamborghini by screwing people in, by eking value out of someone else and not creating value, or you can go make a lot of money by creating value for someone and having that money being a side effect. That's what you were talking about. Do the second.

Joel:

You can either steal it or you can make it. I'm not done with the leaching or the stealing. That's not my style, but you were exactly right. I was thinking to myself, I was like, "Man, this is a lot like maybe Bitcoin and the Blockchain. Life gets harder to solve these things. [chuckles] Yes, there's new tools and stuff, but man, the amount of opportunity, it was huge back in the day. I feel like I would've done really well in the 1950s. [chuckles]

David:

[unintelligible 00:21:32], yes. I'm like you. Look, I was a foster kid but I learned a lot from being a foster kid. I was lucky to be in a foster home with my birth brother. That was a lovely, lovely foster home. Those people are my siblings and my parents now, but also it taught me to be independent. Once again, the world needs lots of people. You don't have to do this, but if you do it, you should do it. You should just do it.

Joel:

100%. I've found that a lot of people actually it's almost become a rule in my anecdotal evidence where people that are interesting or that have done great things typically, have an enormous amount of adversity in their past. Once you get comfortable with doing something hard-- Like for me, when I was a kid, I got hit by a car and I was in a wheelchair for a year. I had to go through the process of walking again. In my mind, even at ages 14 and 15, when I was better, my mind would just say, "Oh, I can do that. It's not as hard as learning how to walk again." That's super easy. When things go bad, I'm like, "Yes, that sucked but I held my mom's hand as she passed away and this is not that bad."

David:

That's exactly right. It's like, "Sorry, I'm going back to business but all the easy stuff has been done in the world, everything." If you're going to be working at a technology company where you're making a change, you should just expect it's going to be hard. You have an opportunity to be innovative.

The world is changing. Technology changes the world, like the [unintelligible 00:23:02] softwares in the world. It's absolutely true. We've opportunities to create companies and systems and applications that do something different that people can go like, "Hey mom, I created this," and mom knows what that is. This is the opportunity that we have. It's hard and there's a lot of ways to screw it up. Like you said, like I said, "Everything I've done have not been successful."

I met Evan Spiegel once right before Snapchat went public. I said, "Dude, you are crushing it. Everything you're doing is successful." He said, "No, it's not. We just don't market the stuff we screwed up." I was like, "I've been trying to [unintelligible 00:23:43]. That was brilliant." It's all hard, but there is opportunity and that's great.

Joel:

We screwed up a lot here at the podcast. We figured first we tried to be leadership training, that didn't work, mostly because of the pandemic. Leadership training was not required for companies. They were needed to cut everything down 100%. We lost like 90% of our revenue within 72 hours of COVID happening.

We said, "All right." We did some sponsorships and then that caps out because there's only so many sponsored episodes you can do. We tried about five different things over the course of two years to generate additional revenue to grow the company farther than just what the sponsorships could provide. We failed at four of them. One of them worked and ended up being like, it makes sense in hindsight. Everybody would be like, "Oh, that's so obvious." We make podcasts for other companies now. We figured it out, basically, the back half of last year and now we have nine other podcasts that we make. That for us, was everyone's like, "Oh, it makes so much sense. It's so logical. You made a podcast" and I make a podcast for other people and all of this stuff and it looks like a smooth transition and process.

I'm like, "No, we tried four other things and we saved our money. We used the little extra cash we had. We used the sponsorship money to pay the bills and then everything over and above that, we ran experiments and tried. Every single one of those 5 times we went 100% into it like it was going to work. This was going to be the thing, we put all of our energy and all of our effort into it, and then it failed. I rallied everybody [chuckles] and we did it again.

I also helped because I had talked to some smart people like your level smart, which is what I consider super smart, technology, business people. They had said something that stood out to me and it was along the lines of, setting the context and conversation was incredibly important. When I took the team into this and said, "We're going to try our first time to generate recurring revenue that will be scalable beyond me being involved as a host or something." I said, "It's probably going to fail. This is probably going to fail, but it'll definitely fail if we don't go into it with 100% belief that it's going to succeed." [chuckles]

What's going to happen is, eventually we'll figure it out. We may be failed 5 times, we might fail 10 times, whatever it is but eventually, we're going to get there. When we do get there, it's going to be awesome. Some of those people stuck around and now they end up leading the departments. [laughs]

David:

Well, before I did this podcast, I was like, what's Joel-- What's his actual business. I did research and then I talked to your folks. I did that at the same thing, I was like, "Oh, that's obvious. That makes so much sense," but it's never obvious when you start. If it was obvious, it would've already been done by somebody else. You have to discover, and it takes a certain amount of intestinal 42 and capital, by the way.

Using your capital wisely and organizing your teams wisely and motivate, it's a lot of stuff. It's not just push, push, push. You got to be smart, you got to be thoughtful. Congratulations to you, you should feel proud and your team should feel proud.

Joel:

It's getting to be a lot of fun, too. We're at the point where we have an open job post 24/7 [chuckles] because we figured out we hire these producers and take on these shows, and then it works super well. It works for the customers and it's just-- You have a podcast, you know it helps with your business, it allows your potential customers that maybe haven't done business with you yet to connect with you. There's a lot of benefits to doing it.

David:

Right. It's a big, big world.

Joel:

It's also small. You know, Etienne De Bruin, right?

David:

Yes.

[chuckling]

Joel:

I met him the first month I started the podcast and all of that, but I was curious between Etienne and somebody named Eric Weiss. Do you know Eric?

David:

I don't know Eric. No.

Joel:

Eric does coaching, but it's just him. He's a good coach, but he just does coaching. The interesting thing that I'm trying to help delineate here is it seems your coaching is more-- You create the plan and then you coach the people through the plan, and it has some serious business impact. It seems like maybe some of the Etienne customers at 7CTOs help people work through things in general. How do you see the differences between groups like Etienne's, the 7CTOs thing, individuals like Eric Weiss that will coach people in transition from $10 million to $20 million? They're just maybe it's co-founder conflict or whatever it is and then what you do? How do you see those three things because it's easy to lump them all together and say, "You guys are CTO coaches or your consultants" or something like that, but how do you see the difference between those?

David:

I don't know, Eric, so it's hard for me to compare with him. ETienne's thing or groups, which are valuable. On the LA CTO Forum, we have similar groups. LA CTO Forums are not for profit, but the one-on-one coaching we do, we definitely start with, "Where do you want to go? Where do you want to go for your department? Where do you want to go as a CTO or chief product officer? Where do you want to go in your life?"

Now, we're not life coaches but we start with grounding of "What's your goals? Where do you want to go on different levels of business and where do you want to go next?" which some of our coaching said, "I eventually want to start my own company and I need tools to get there."

We go, like "Why are those your goals? Why do you want to start your own company? There's a million things going on the world, why that?" We spend time digging into, "Are these really your goals? Should these be your goals?" We do a 360 when we ask the people in their environment, questions to say, "Where is this person? Where do you think they should go?" They would come back and we go and say, "Here's what you said your goals are. Here's what we heard. Should we modify any of them?" Then we do go to what you're saying, like, "Okay, in order for you to go there, what steps do you have to take, let's lay them on the roadmap. Let's meet regularly and talk about how you're doing on each of them."

By the way, if something ad hoc comes up like you're presenting to the board and the board you need to help think about how to do it, like what to throw that in the mix? How do you get to where you want to go for your business, for your department, for yourself? How do you do that? Let's not just spend time that we're talking every other week or once a week, and just talk about whatever comes up. Let's be goal-directed."

Maybe Eric does that too, that's awesome if he does. The 7CTOs thing which I know something about, it's a peer group of people giving each other advice and that it adds value. No, all of us have been CTOs and chief product officers, so our clients will come to us, the ones that we're coaching and we'll say, "How have you faced this before?" We're glad to tell them about that, but they're a different thing.

Joel:

I love how everybody is super friendly, between each other that do similar things because you would think from the outside that it would be not that way, because they're competitive, to some degree. There are slightly different ways to solve the same problem and there's pros and cons to all of them. I love how friendly everybody is because the CTO leadership world is pretty tight and there's a lot of opportunity there. Everybody that's putting in the effort seems to be getting a good result.

David:

If you believe that it's a fixed-size pie, then the money that Etienne gets means we don't get it. If you believe that you can expand the pie, then I love that Etienne exists in the world.

Joel:

The pie's expandable, man.

David:

Technology help us.

Joel:

Yes, just go to the hospitals, look at all the babies coming out, the pie is expanding. [laughs]

David:

Yes, right.

Joel:

What I wanted to do before we wrap up here is, I wanted to learn what's your website? What's your domain so people can go and learn more about your services or contact you if they have an interest in that? Do you have some specific call to action?

David:

Yes. There is the contact us on the website, it's www.interna.com, so it's internal without the L, I-N-T-E-R-N-A.com. You can hit me up everywhere on the internet dsubar, D-S-U-B-A-R, it's like Subaru without the U. You can see I've done this once or twice before.

[chuckling]

David:

You can hit me up there anywhere on the web and just hit me up, I'm glad to talk with-- I'm just glad to spend time with people like "Hey, just can you give me five minutes advice [unintelligible 00:32:41]" I'm just glad to do that, too.

Joel:

No, I love it and I super love what you're doing. You're out there helping people who need it. I've been in those positions. That's one of the reasons why I like having people in your line of work on the show is because for a long-time, I wish I would've known that that was the solution to my problem. I was doing everything by myself.

I wasn't part of a group. I didn't know that you could go to coaches like that. I didn't understand it was a thing that-- You know coaches exist but you don't necessarily connect it to like "They can help me solve this problem." I had one view of life coaches. I didn't understand that there were like CTO-specific coaches that know exactly the organizational structure issues you're facing and the growth issues and all of that.

If I would've done [chuckles] that, that would've saved me a lot of pain. I don't do that at all, my business doesn't do that at all. If I can amplify that and let people know like a public service announcement "If you're having problems go get involved with a coach or a group or something, but just don't fight it all by yourself because that's super lonely in the position. As you know is lonely enough as it is." [chuckles]

David:

Right. If people who want to know about the LA CTO Forum, hit me up and I'll tell them about that too, and how to apply and how to get accepted to that, too. Look, once again, [inaudible 00:34:08]

[00:34:10]