There are many parallels between entrepreneurship and raising a child. In the beginning, you cannot be fully conscious of the outcome. Both also can be exceptionally difficult at first but eventually you’ll start to see the results. As a society we place a large importance on the end result. Whether it be your business making headlines, finishing a big race or your child eventually growing up to be very successful; we often praise the end rather than the journey itself.
This week, the DadCorp Podcast is joined by Tim Demoures, co-founder and managing director of Eloquens; the leading platform for sharing and selling professional best practices. He’s also a new father to 7-month old Rafael.
Jonathan and Tim speak on this notion that the journey needs be appreciated instead of the end result. They apply this to entrepreneurship, raising a child and even video games. The guys go on to discuss the possible benefits associated with video games and screen time while also weighing the drawbacks. It’s interesting to consider the fact that these games can open kids up to valuable building skills, allow for creativity, development of strategy and even working with a team. These are all skills that can be applied and transferred to any business or career later in life.
Tim expresses the desire to place focus on providing his child with the right tools, skills and qualities to find his “star.” He dislikes the more “old school” approach to education that has such a narrow emphasis on only certain disciplines. Math, literature and science are at the forefront and all the other subjects are considered secondary. In a system like this, “it’s hard to measure success but it’s easier to measure grades.” This method used in the educational system creates limitations around creativity and the building of an entrepreneurial spirit. Quoting Sir Ken Robinson, when it comes to your child’s education, the key is not the knowledge itself but rather, how you lead your child to know their passion. There isn’t a one size fits all for education.
According to a TedTalk by Jennifer Senior, happiness for parents is a very high bar. For Jonathan, this changed his entire perspective on parenting. He started to view it for what it is, a crisis. The parents of today are anxious, stressed and nervous about providing the best upbringing for their children.
However, you cannot anticipate what your child’s future will look like. Tim asserts that since we cannot predict the outcome, as parents, we need to shift our focus to the journey and giving our children all the necessary tools to succeed.
3 Key Takeaways from the Discussion:
1. Your child’s future is uncertain. We need to work towards knowing and understanding our children so we can provide them with the proper tools to succeed.
2. Raising a child is a lot like building a business. Both can be very challenging in the beginning phases, require a ton of work, pre-preparation. You will learn from your experiences and start to see the evidence of your efforts, it’s all worth it.
3. The way children learn is constantly evolving. With technology and the easy access to information, kids can learn things at a faster rate than older generations. Something that would take sifting through a 300-page book is now a quick Google search. It’s important to be open to actually learning from your kids, once in a while, instead of the other way around. As a father, it’s completely acceptable to not always have the answer.
There are many parallels between entrepreneurship and raising a child. In the beginning, you cannot be fully conscious of the outcome. Both also can be exceptionally difficult at first but eventually you’ll start to see the results. As a society we place a large importance on the end result. Whether it be your business making headlines, finishing a big race or your child eventually growing up to be very successful; we often praise the end rather than the journey itself.
This week, the DadCorp Podcast is joined by Tim Demoures, co-founder and managing director of Eloquens; the leading platform for sharing and selling professional best practices. He’s also a new father to 7-month old Rafael.
Jonathan and Tim speak on this notion that the journey needs be appreciated instead of the end result. They apply this to entrepreneurship, raising a child and even video games. The guys go on to discuss the possible benefits associated with video games and screen time while also weighing the drawbacks. It’s interesting to consider the fact that these games can open kids up to valuable building skills, allow for creativity, development of strategy and even working with a team. These are all skills that can be applied and transferred to any business or career later in life.
Tim expresses the desire to place focus on providing his child with the right tools, skills and qualities to find his “star.” He dislikes the more “old school” approach to education that has such a narrow emphasis on only certain disciplines. Math, literature and science are at the forefront and all the other subjects are considered secondary. In a system like this, “it’s hard to measure success but it’s easier to measure grades.” This method used in the educational system creates limitations around creativity and the building of an entrepreneurial spirit. Quoting Sir Ken Robinson, when it comes to your child’s education, the key is not the knowledge itself but rather, how you lead your child to know their passion. There isn’t a one size fits all for education.
According to a TedTalk by Jennifer Senior, happiness for parents is a very high bar. For Jonathan, this changed his entire perspective on parenting. He started to view it for what it is, a crisis. The parents of today are anxious, stressed and nervous about providing the best upbringing for their children.
However, you cannot anticipate what your child’s future will look like. Tim asserts that since we cannot predict the outcome, as parents, we need to shift our focus to the journey and giving our children all the necessary tools to succeed.
3 Key Takeaways from the Discussion:
1. Your child’s future is uncertain. We need to work towards knowing and understanding our children so we can provide them with the proper tools to succeed.
2. Raising a child is a lot like building a business. Both can be very challenging in the beginning phases, require a ton of work, pre-preparation. You will learn from your experiences and start to see the evidence of your efforts, it’s all worth it.
3. The way children learn is constantly evolving. With technology and the easy access to information, kids can learn things at a faster rate than older generations. Something that would take sifting through a 300-page book is now a quick Google search. It’s important to be open to actually learning from your kids, once in a while, instead of the other way around. As a father, it’s completely acceptable to not always have the answer.
J: What is up dads? You have Jonathan Shiery here back again. Episode 12, the Dad Corp podcast. If you’re listening, you’ve now been part of the team that has listened across 26 countries. We have been downloaded across 4 continents and over 330 different cities. So we want to thank you all for listening, for sharing, for liking, for reviewing. And we hope to continue to bring this great platform out globally as we become the biggest dad podcast on the web.
This week’s guest, I had the chance to sit down with Timothy Demoures who is the managing director of eloquens.com, he’s the co-founder. Eloquens.com is a fascinating disruptor around knowledge content. They are the leading marketplace for professional best practices in finance, strategy, leadership, and HR. So if any of you dads are in the corporate setting and you’re looking for tools, templates, insights, best practices to accelerate your day-to-day responsibilities, or if you’re a dad looking to make additional income on your own content and your expertise, check them out. They have over a hundred and twenty thousand professional users and 350 authors. I found a number of amazing pieces of content as it relates to my own career and I certainly recommend you take a look for yourself. His co-founder is the French serial entrepreneur Antoine Duboscq, who also was the co-founder of adVentures Startup Studio. Tim has a really interesting background, very global. He was born in Lyon in France. He grew up across France, Switzerland, and UK. He’s the oldest of 5 siblings, 3 sisters and 1 brother. He played rugby for 20 years between the ages of 8 to 28. He learnt English from scratch when he was living in England at the age of 8. He participated in international simulations with United Nations as a student and teenager. He was a boy scout and then as a child and teenager, he had a big passion around building and creating things which makes a lot of sense with his entrepreneurial spirit. He graduated valedictorian of EDHEC Business School. He has a very broad spectrum of hobbies and interests. He loves history and anthropology, space, science, and breakthrough technology. In addition, Tim is married for 2 years. His wife, Jen is currently studying neuropsychology so this is clearly 1-hour intellectual couple. They have a young son, at the time of this recording was 7-months old, Raphael. He’s planning to have many more. And in this discussion one of the key things that we talked about was his concern, our concern, around the educational structure, the educational system, and its limitations for barriers around creativity, and building an entrepreneurial spirit, and a number of other areas that we believe could be improved. We discussed the Sir Ken Robinson podcast. We discussed the Airbnb TED Talk and Guy Kawasaki. So we had a lot of discussions on these areas. We covered a lot of ground in our talk. I hope that you find it both entertaining as well as interesting. We discussed Guy Kawasaki, Sir Ken Robinson, Airbnb, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Ben Shapiro. So we covered a lot of ground. It was so much fun. It was an honor to talk to Tim. This is actually the first time we had ever met and we did virtually. We spoke for almost 2 hours and we could have talked for a long time more. I can’t wait to have Tim back. So please listen, like, share, but most importantly take the gold nuggets that Tim shares with us in his first year of experience as a dad and his thoughtfulness on approaching parenthood overall and apply it to your life to make an epic fatherhood and continue to live the dad life. Without further ado, let’s get Tim on here so he can share his perspectives straight from his own words. Thanks dads. We’ll see you on the show.
J: So you use Brave?
T: Yes, I use Brave. It’s one of these browsers, I don’t know if you know them. It hasn’t got any cookies on them so it’s really useful when you want to run an internet set or just run around the web without being traced everywhere and ads all over the places. It’s just much faster as well in terms of uploading pages because you don’t have all the background noise happening.
J: Yeah, you’re the first person that I’ve spoken to that knows about Brave just without me having to educate them on it. When the cryptocurrency bubble started back in, I guess that was early 2017 or late 2017 or so, the Basic Attention Token and I got into that and I was following it because the guy that created that created the Brave browser behind it he created JavaScript and Firefox and so I was like if there was somebody you’re going to bet on that’s made some successful kind of deliveries out to the market, that is the guy, right? And so I got into Brave and I tell everybody ‘when you use Brave browser versus others, it’s almost like back in the day when you had to do the dial-up internet versus getting ethernet. It’s really a demonstratively faster.
T: Absolutely. I can’t agree more. I used to be a Chrome fan. I still have to use it to test all the things without console of course but the shift to Brave was just amazing. I had Brave browsers in parallel, the speed was just night and day, completely different.
J: The Chrome browser, I’ve actually soured on it because I feel like I keep getting these viruses or some type of popups and so they just become difficult. Have you had any problems with those?
T: I haven’t. I’ve had on the other hand quite a lot of cookies or instant messages come through because at some point I might have clicked on something on the site so they traced me all the way down the line so. With time, yes. I’ve had some strange things which probably linked to things I clicked on which I’ve forgotten about. But nothing in terms of malware. I’ve not that kind of stuff on my end to be honest.
J: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s, I’m sure there’s user error along the way and for whatever reason I downloaded some app and one of the things I’ve gotten into is to try to learn how to do editing and video editing and podcast editing just so when I’m (inaudible), I’m not working in the car like if I take my car in to the mechanic, I have no idea how to change. And so at least I could help educate in some way, I guess how a little bit dangerously but I think I probably downloaded some freeware stuff that turned into spyware and all that (inaudible)
T: That’s it. Are you on Mac or PC on your end?
J: I’m on a PC. How about you?
T: Okay. I’m on Mac so that might explain the difference as well. Because Macs tend to have apparently a high level of security due to the fact that it’s not very much customizable. So there are less open doors for these for let’s say new things that you can do on a PC, the kind of as you mentioned knowing what’s under the hood. But the good side of that is then you’re quite safe in terms of viruses. PC has got your back on that I would say that might lead to the slight difference in what we’ve been seeing on our end.
J: I would think so. I had a Mac for a while and then I got into this surface tablets and I’ve really enjoyed the really powerful tools. But to your point I mean if Mac was like a character in World of Warcraft, that would be like impenetrable level 70 or something that nobody can do these things.
T: That’s it. Exactly. No, no. They have it spawned on that. It’s just much easier. I don’t come from a very high-end tech background so Mac is great for people like me who just want a fast user experience with a great design and who don’t want to spend too much time customizing things to specific situations. Yeah, that’s probably one of the reasons why. Also in the end, I switched to Brave. It’s actually, of course you know him maybe, Joe Rogan, other leading podcaster who recommended Brave and I said ‘oh, let’s have it a shot,’ and to be honest I’m not, I haven’t been surprised by it yet. It’s excellent.
J: I did not know Rogan was a fan but I guess maybe Brave probably isn’t as hidden as I thought it was because there’s so many people who listen to his podcast, I’m sure a lot of people.
T: Yeah. It’s amazing. And he’s the kind of guy who, he’s a lot into freedom of speech, into managing your stuff on your end without too many people having to look at your background and so. This is not surprising for him. I think he chooses his sponsors wisely. He’s like okay. At least that’s what he says on paper, things he believes in and so there’s some kind of off-the-chart solutions that pop out like that which are for some of them excellent. So yeah, that’s been great, right.
J: I always joke about Rogen because he says things in a way that, you know I don’t even care sometimes if he’s paid or not, he just does it so convincingly. Half of the things that I have in my house are probably because of a podcast I listened to him. I have that bleacher blocks subscription. I’ve got the Onnit, vitamins coming in. I don’t know if you ever heard him talk about those beef bars, the 100% grass-fed beef jerky bars snack. I got boxes of those sitting around. I sit there and I listened to him and sometimes I’m like if he doesn’t believe in that stuff, he sure as hell does a good job of making me think he does and he just says it in such a way that I’m like I need to get that.
T: Yeah, absolutely. The butcher’s box one is the ones I remember the most. I know he’s just struck a chord. I think he says it in a way that’s just super natural and logic, he’s got that. well, he’s a standup comedian as well so it’s not surprising. He’s got this way of telling ads which is unique to his character. But I trust he does kind of believe in it in some form. It wouldn’t be surprising. He’s not the type of character that tends to just take the highest bids and then put it up there, otherwise given the success he’s having at the moment he get other brands advertise on his show because they’ll be given a bigger check so that might be the reason.
J: I don’t think it either, right? He’s become so wildly successful across so many different arenas. I don’t know if you’re a fan of the mix martial arts and the UFC but Dana White, the head of that organization, he credits so much of their success in mainstream because of Joe Rogan as a tele commentator. His voice is just so uniquely positioned for live action or podcasting. It just kind of to your point like in comedy he just does such a wide range of stuff with his voice, his personality that just comes across so well.
T: Yeah and I’d say the thing that really surprised me about him I discovered him some time last year, maybe a few years ago so not that long ago and what I really liked about him was the fact that all his podcasts were unscripted. They felt a lot natural. They’re long in terms of format so you can really get into the depth of specific topics of the different people’s character he has on the show. And as you mentioned in the email conversation we had, it feels like a better conversation in jumping from one subject to the other then going back to it if need be, making associations. It’s just much better than some of the podcasts that are out there which are very scripted and maybe too bullet like in terms of the speed and the formatted closer to television and longer, and more far away from what people want actually in the end which is a surprise for everyone.
J: Yeah. I know you’ve probably lived up in to that corporate America scene at some point in your career and we’ll get on some of that at some point too, but for me I’ve spent so much of my time in large corporate America that this podcast that we’re doing here this is actually like a breath of fresh air to get away and just enjoy the conversation with somebody. Share some ideas. Discuss different things. Learn some new things. That’s something I always took away from Rogan’s podcasts it’s like it goes all over the place but I walk away and I was like ‘hey, there are like a couple of interesting things in there that I learned and I enjoyed the conversation.’ I felt like he actually makes it in a format that makes you feel like you’re sitting in a chair with him, just hanging out and listening to some of the discussions with some friends.
T: Yeah, absolutely. That’s exactly, you hit it there.
J: And I think from the speaker and even for me personally I enjoyed the conversations more like you and I have never had a chance to meet but we’ve already in the last 10 minutes just discussed a couple of different things randomly that weren’t even part of our initial communications.
T: Exactly.
J: And I think it’s fun. You’re just talking, sharing some ideas whatever stuff of mine you have. That’s how you act in everyday life. Why would we do it differently?
T: Absolutely. Exactly. It’s back to the basics. Back to the discussions around the fireplace, the inspirational end of it. I think you have to set things a lot of course. The atmosphere that you build around the conversation. And just knowing you can keep the conversation going as long as you’d like to hang out with someone to discuss various different things with no specific objective in mind.
J: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more.
T: I really appreciate the angle from which you guys are coming with the podcast. I think it’s something that a lot of fathers out there from of all ages are looking to get these insights from other adventures, other stories. And I listened to bits of the two previous podcasts you guys had and I think it’s very valuable so congrats on that. What was when you decide the spark that led you to actually create this whole thing and what’s your story?
J: Yeah, you know hopefully something that resonates with what you’re going through. But when I first had my daughter, my life just completely changed. I love the pretty carefree life for most of the few (inaudible) years or so. I always focused on a career and even at one point, I wasn’t sure that I even was the right person to have kids. It wasn’t something that was on my top of the list and made me super excited. And so when I had my daughter, it was just like there was before my daughter and after my daughter. And I started going through of the monsoon of just like, I was fortunate that I had friends and people around me that had already started that journey and people that I admire and respect. So I would go for them for advice and they gave me good advice. I noticed there wasn’t a whole lot of resources out there, certainly nothing aggregated which would probably tie in a little bit with what your company is doing as well.
T: Yeah, true.
J: Liken aggregating content, aggregating knowledge and getting insights. And so there was a lot of users for mothers and there’s a lot of focus around mothers but I felt personally that as a father simple things like even taking my daughter to a changing station. In the men’s bathroom, there’s nothing there. Giving out the format of corporate America and saying that I’m the secondary (crosstalk) I was like ‘what do you mean secondary? She calls us mom and dad like we’re equal into this.’ Then I end up at the playgrounds or I end up at these classes and I look around and I’m like, you know what? There’s a lot of dads here, right? There’s a lot of engaged dads. And I actually grew up without a father. I have a single mother and so I didn’t have any kind of a role model.
T: Okay.
J: And so for me I was like ‘you know what? I bet there’s other people out there that would like to share and there’s some who would like to be more appreciated, like to have more resources. And so that’s where the idea came from.
T: Got it. That’s great. It’s a great story. Let me tell you believe it or not it’s amazing how what I would also add is the position of the father today is changing significantly. And so even for those who had no chance of having a father around can see that the education they received or the style that their father, grandfather had is something which needs to be adapt to the current context. Choosing the best bits of what you received also refracturing that to the fact that there’re working mothers, that the position of men globally is different. It’s a huge challenge. It’s true. I’ve had the same thing on my side. My wife has tons of Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups or other kinds of resources to tap into as a mother and as a wife. But for guys it’s quite limited especially because the way we communicate on these things is probably all different as well.
J: No, we’re not exactly know for our communication abilities either, let’s be honest, right? One of the things I have seen here though in having talking to guests and recorded about 8 other podcasts that are going through the editing process, people really open up. And one of my hypotheses is like if we all open up, we start having these conversations, other people will be more open to having these conversations, saying like ‘I feel guilty, right?
T: Absolutely.
J: I feel guilty because I’m in business. I’m trying to be successful but every time, every minute that I have to travel to some other part of the world is a minute away from my kid. And so you’re constantly trying to make sure you’re balancing that. It’s not easy. And so you never feel like (inaudible) great in saying that but I think I’ve heard it a lot more in this podcast. And hopefully is that words get out and more people will be open to it.
T: Yeah, absolutely.
J: I’m sure Tim, you’re probably in the mix of that, right? You said you had your son who’s 7 months and he’s your first. Once you’re (crosstalk) on the job right now, that first year is not an easy year.
T: Absolutely. I can’t agree more on that. Having a 7-month old just a hundred percent attention all day long. His first 2 weeks have we, he’s a very active as well so we have a with a double layer but it’s amazing how fast your life, you mentioned it as well, how fast your life changes from the different stages that you actually quickly go through as a man from being independent, on your own with or without a girlfriend, then with a girlfriend, then looking to get married, and married with a child. That first year which indeed seems to be a huge rocket ship. And then the other phases which come through later on their life which seem to be incredibly rich and powerful too. It’s about initial phase really transforms I think a lot in to our perspectives. It’s a big shift you definitely want to share around.
J: And so Raphael?
T: Raphael, yeah.
J: Is that how you pronounce your son’s name, Raphael?
T: Yeah, Raphael. It’s like Raphael Nadal. I don’t know if you know the tennis player. It’s like Ralph, that’s what we could call him as well.
J: Well, my wife is Columbian and so I’m really familiar with the accents on letters but I’m not so familiar with double dot that you wrote so I wasn’t sure if that changes the pronunciation or if it’s a similar pronunciation to the Spanish translation.
T: Yeah, it’s exactly the same pronunciation. And that first name also exists for women. So you have Raphaelle with 2 Ls and an E at the end and Raphael with just 1 L which is the masculine version.
J: That is good. Your 7 months you’re right in the teething phase right now. Is that where he’s at, at this point?
T: Yeah, exactly. Well, he grew a lot in the past, since the lockdown. So we’ve seen him changed from week to week. It’s amazing. He’s had his teething phase actually since just a couple of months ago so it’s been regularly every 2 or 3 weeks, he’s had a little crisis. And it seems like we’re not very far from the first teeth coming out yet. It’s a matter of days or weeks. I don’t know how much but yeah, it’s going to be quite cute to see that come through.
J: How has he been over all? Has he slept a lot? Has he been a relatively active baby? What’s the experience like for you?
T: Yeah. It’s always the first one is the hard one because you can never compare it to any of your other children. So you have reference points with friends and family or brothers and sisters if you had the chance to experience that if you have a big age difference. But he’s been right from the start, a pretty active little boy I’d say. Not hard meaning that he’s had the classic kind of progression. The first 2 months were a big hit on sleep, for sure. That was a new discovery. And you discover new capacity in these owns but afterwards actually pretty quickly enough after 2 and half months, 3 months he’s started to have pretty long nights, I’d say after around these. So that got us going and since then, he’s been doing great, sleeping around 10 hours a night. So that’s great. But not a lot during the day. So the day is a tough one, hard to get him to sleep.
J: Who usually does the night duty like actually gets him to sleep?
T: Oh, the night duty, okay. Well, we actually share it to be honest. So we both have occupations which are quite intense. So we tend to try and share as much responsible. During the first 2 months, actually I’d say I was the one who was waking up more, simple because my wife had to recover from the pregnancy and the birth. And she was still studying as well so she went back to university pretty quickly. I know most of my friends it was the other way around. It was mostly the mother waking up during these first few phases but I was doing I’d say probably two-thirds of the night and then trying to recover during the night and during the day way safe. I could have a little power nap here and there.
J: Yeah. You wrote it when we were chatting across email that your wife’s studying neuropsychology. And then I was reading some of the things you’re into which is everything from how schools create or kill creativity to or even the speech. What are some of the things that you guys are already getting excited or starting to do differently than you think the traditional parents will approach parenting in the first year? Are you doing different games or are you guys doing different types of households like which are your kind of strategy right now?
T: It’s a good question. The first phase that was interesting for us was to try and get a glimpse of who we have in front of us. Your kid is very different from one to the other. So in his case, what we discovered is that he’s a very active child. He needs a lot of things to do. He always wants to grab something, to hit something, to test a new noise. He loves fooling around with his grandfather a minute. We were staying in my wife’s parents house at the minute for the lockdown. And so what we’ve tried to do, so she has an approach, my wife, she likes to observe things. She likes to try universalize solutions for problems so she’s been very useful for that and on my end I’m trying to get in front of his hands some stuff which he can play with, which he can bang on so he can discover how they behave. He seems to love books strangely enough for an active kid. When he’s in front of a book, he calms down. So reading a book along with him, trying to identify progressively all the different animals or objects and seeing how he reacts, that’s been quite fun. You see our strategy is mainly being quite a vast array of options, seeing what he grabs on and then spotting what he really likes, and accelerating that on the things that he likes a lot but also giving him some stuff that’s a little more far out of his usual, his fears so he can discover them and move like that. That’s where we’re at basically at the moment.
J: What’s your thought on screen time? Do you have an opinion there?
T: I think, well my wife says, obviously that neuropsychologist so professional in her sphere, that screen’s a something to limit as much as possible until the age of 4, I think which fall for apparently things limit to attention span. So we try when we watch tv, when we watch a movie, or the news, we try and put him into a position where he’s not in the option to have a peep at the screen although he desperately wants to have a look at it so it’s kind of a, because it’s a very awkward positions to try and get a glimpse of the corner of the tv sometimes. Yeah, so we try to limit as much as possible. But we’re lucky because he doesn’t seem to be that much interested. I thought he’d be more so it’s been less of an issue for us on the tv, on screens, for that one. But for the mobile phone on the other hand, not. I don’t have an experience on that but the phone seems to be something they like, they seem to catch a lot more.
J: It’s a wildly confusing experience for me to be honest because I have mixed feelings and then I’m not always practicing what I preach either and I’m sure a lot of people in the business can sympathize with like you do a lot of your work now with your mobile phones, you always have it in your hand. As my daughter has become older, part of me says exposure is important. And I actually was exposed to the internet when I was about 16 years old when it first starting to come out. And so I actually got a chance to work in an internet provider. And I was on chatrooms. I (inaudible) dial-up. And as I feel like that drove my intuitive understanding of technology much better than some of my peers who started doing that little bit later. So like I had that feeling like exposures or important exposures kind of ramps up your (inaudible) but then the other part that is very fair is the focus and the self-creativity. When you’re just consuming, you’re not building and the best way to build and create, and innovate and advance is trial and error and just making mistakes and learning. And when you’re seeing the end product that’s everything not going through your own in a natural process. I have this like middle point view where I think there needs to be a balance. The other interesting thing though that I’ll tell you, my daughter, she’s definitely only 6 years old but understanding technology really well using YouTube. I mean she knows how to use a remote which part of that was maybe learning she used through the corona virus quarantine. So we’ve used a lot more screen time than we like at this point but when you’re in a 12 hundred New York square foot apartment, you’re kind of stuck. But it’s interesting because I almost think in some ways some of these kids are going to reject some of that technology more than we do because it was introduced during our generation so we’ve become enamored by it and our kids have seen it. And so my daughter will come up and say ‘daddy, no phone. No phone daddy.’ And so like she actually starts to look at the phone and the internet and computer as like negative things which is really fascinating.
T: Exactly. I can’t agree with you more and that I have a couple of remarks on that. the first one is indeed it’s the same thing for me. I discovered the internet when I was a teenager. And my parent we’re really trying to push back against screen so it was kind of a big fight. And I’d say the differentiating factor is that we have the ability to control and educate as well our kids on screens while our parents maybe didn’t have that opportunity because they didn’t know what really things were, the impacts, the possibilities. So we indeed, we have this way of giving our kids the right tools to discriminate whether it’s a good time or not to be on the screen for the limitations are a bit. It’s just, I think that in the last 20 years it’s kind of zone where for people on the extreme, it was complicated thing to be too much exposed. But now we’re a bit of distanced from it. Yeah, I think there’s going to be a healthy balance. And my second point was, I don’t know if you had some thoughts on that too, is on video games. That’s been a huge debate with my wife, has that been on yours as well?
J: Video games?
T: Yeah.
J: What kind of debate are you all having?
T: So the big debate is on the positives and negatives of (inaudible) video gaming for kids. Notably because, a bit like you I think it’s something which has some high benefits because you can build things. With video games you can develop certain connective skills, mindset, passions. So it’s got some really good points on one side but the other of course is the addictive side of it which can be kind of a loophole for some. So it’s always been the debate whether it’s something we should be pushing or not for the future and she’s more on the conservative end. I’m on the balanced end, so being obeisant.
J: Yeah, you know that one’s, so personally video games were probably not productive for me through college. You and I are probably I think are similar age and so I don’t know if you remember the old James Bond multiplayer games. When those got introduced, it’s so, I can’t say I attended every class but I can tell you I played the hell out of that game. So I can understand that like the moral of the story there, that addictive personality, right? Like you start playing those things and it’s really hard to put down and you can become unproductive. But I was also a very big fan of the RPG and strategy games. I was a little bit of a Final Fantasy nerd. And it’s funny you’re bringing up video games because I have Final Fantasy XV on my mobile phone and it’s something I got back into with the corona virus quarantine and Milan and I have been playing. And one of the things I love about that is like the building of something like the strategy like you have this team. You have to make your person productive as part of the team that you’re on. You have to decide what you do with your money. You have to decide what you build your resources and then how you deploy those. You have to be patient because things take time in building your character up. And I get to see something where you have, in this game you have a character that literally have no power and 10 pieces of gold to have an empire. And so you get to see like the process of building things and making decisions and seeing the outcomes. And she’s had a lot of fun with this so I totally can understand your viewpoint on the I guess benefits of it because I think something personally for me like I actually look at my career in similar fashions. I don’t know how you (crosstalk) if you’re a video game player, I look at my career as if I get a sort of case of love going up. If I put another podcast out like it’s another feather in the cap. And so I’m building something and I have this kind of vision in my head. It was like what my, I don’t want to use the word empire because it’s a bad word. I think it’s taboo but what my kind of end goal and what the future state looks like but I also know it takes time and you just add one more thing to the clip. But I also get, I can see her view too. I get something you have to manage because life is not a game. If you get focused on one thing, there’s a million others you need to learn outside of your how to be good in a video game. And I think it’s more than a video game but there’s certain qualities I think you build but there’s other qualities that you just focus on as well.
T: Yeah, I can totally agree with you on that. one of the big games I used to play on was Age of Empires, the second version. That was next in games as well. I played a little bit of that.
J: That was a great one, yeah. I mean all these RPG games like that are a lot of fun, right?
T: Yeah, absolutely. Just amazing how I think it’s, to be honest one of the, I don’t know if I could say it’s one of the, it can actually be an education. In my CV, playing that game was, I just learned so much in terms of as you mentioned thinking about strategies, building things progressively, learning how to take hits, managing uncertainty, playing with other people, in terms of creativity too because you have abilities to customize your maps to create scenarios. And in itself it looks a lot like what the digital entrepreneurship has become for sure. And I’m pretty sure that there’s some reflexes that we’ve built during these periods of gaming activated neuropsychologically. In real life business it’s the same adrenalin, the same as you’re saying block by block. And that’s something which I think would have been harder to get with other alternatives that are outside of the video gaming world. So definitely got a lot of value for sure.
J: Yeah, it’s interesting you just said that because one of the other effects you get from gaming and I don’t think we always appreciate it in business as much as we should is the appreciation of the journey, right? In games is you’re building your character. So one of the most exciting times are when you get to level up and you’ve added up and you start to become more productive and you’re going through this process and you’re looking forward. But you know, when you end the game like a video game, I’m sure you played them till the end, that kind of final credits is actually never, never is kind of, I’m trying to think of the right word here but it’s never as kind of exciting or as climatic as you wanted it to be. It’s almost like ‘oh, wow. It’s over.’ And I think that happens in business too, right? Like you reach your milestone and you’re like ‘oh, well that wasn’t really what I kind of expected there,’ but really the find is in the journey.
T: I can’t agree more with you on that. it’s one of the, for me one of the problems in terms of communication on building businesses and entrepreneurship as a whole today is there’s a lot of focus in terms of those who are not in it, you’re promoting entrepreneurship on the end price, on that credit phase should it be selling your company or fundraising. It’s essentially these 2 things. But if you want to do it for that, for these parts, to raise a lot money, to be on the headlines, to sell your company and also have headlines and have everyone in your family and friends, they give you big tap on the back ‘well, don’t go for it.’ My advice is the journey is everything and you just have to love it the whole way. It’s probably something you can reference to on your end on how it’s been with Dad Corp but for me definitely it’s been the center of the thing.
J: Yeah and you know, you just started and forgive me if I pronounce it wrong and I know you said 2016 so not just, that’s the wrong word. You use Eloquens, is that how I would pronounce it?
T: Yeah, Eloquens, exactly.
J: Tell me a little about Eloquens because I got a chance to browse through and coming from a consulting industry, I felt like I probably needed to get more podcast out for the Dad Corp because you might take me out of business on that side.
T: Definitely. So Eloquens is a company I co-founded in 2016 with a former experienced treasury consultant for a Frenchman called Antoine Duboscq, who’s also a serial entrepreneur so he had both hats so that was great. The story behind that is so I was in Strategy Consulting at that time, Strategy& which is now the Strategy Consulting now moved PwC. So I did a short experience there, 6 moths, loved the way to get in the case studies, everything. But a few months into the job a couple of things kind of made me think about whether this was a career I wanted to continue in. A lot of things there but the main one being that wasn’t the passion, the sense of building things, like a video game. I had the impression of not contributing to something specific, identifiable that would make a big change in the long run. And then I met Antoine through a friend at this time and he basically was building various different kinds of startups and collaborative technology, intrinsic engineering and he was thinking about trying to get his previous consulting experience. He had a witty firm with 30 consultants at that time. Getting that online is some kind of format because he was a bit sad in a way that all his experience, his assets were not readily available for others to benefit from it. And so he set up a website, put them there, and it started to work well. And when we met, he said ‘Tim, I know you’re looking for something different, something with all the passion and entrepreneurship. I have this basically this idea of opening up my website to other experts, authors in strategy and consulting but beyond in finance, in marketing, in leadership, in HR and I’d love to see if it’s something you’d be able to and willing to lead and build.’ I said ‘okay, why not?’ at that time I wasn’t, I didn’t have a girlfriend. I was still, you know nothing to lose so I said ‘okay, let’s go. Let’s do it.’ And so block by block we built the platform as it stands today. And it’s been wonderful. So what we are now is basically the leading platform to share and sell professional best practices. And there’s finance, strategy, marketing, HR, leadership, and even technology. And we have 350 authors and more than a hundred twenty thousand registered users.
J: Congratulations, man. That sounds like some journey. Is this your first entrepreneurial venture?
T: Yeah. Let’s say officially in terms of managing a company. Yes, it’s the first one that I had to manage. I had like most people in entrepreneurships and some previous I’d say practice rounds through non-profit at 30s previously. So that helped but yeah, that’s the first one. So beginning of the curve for me with also that luxury of being on this company with an experienced serial entrepreneur like kind of a mini Elon Musk and so it’s bringing what I don’t have which is the long experience in building companies and seeing all the pitfalls.
J: Yeah, and what has been the most surprising type of learning you’ve had since the adventure and the experience that you’ve gotten into here?
T: I’d say the biggest learning I’ve had is the fact that entrepreneurship is really tough. It’s one of these things where you when you look at the mountain, at first you’re like ‘okay, that should be doable. That should be about what I should do to get there.’ And in that sense, it’s just completely different journey than you imagine and that you need to have some stamina to go through it. And so that’s been the big learning point and I’d say the first main one. And the second one was probably where to change old habits that were previously deconstructed maybe through the education I received, to look for risk and uncertainty rather than to overthink things in advance. So having various different directions in which to go into, seeing what works, building upon that, crisscrossing things. So that’s been an eye opener.
J: You know it’s interesting that you said that around of being tough, now we’ll tie that into parenting. Parenting’s tough. I bet a lot of your learnings from the first year of entrepreneurship and going down this venture you’ve been able to take into the first year of going through raising a child, has there been certain things that you’ve drawn from that?
T: Absolutely. I really discovered that bringing up a young child and this will continue with time is indeed something very similar to entrepreneurship. You know you’re starting something. You don’t know what you get. It’s kind of a little lottery here. Then you have that first phase which corresponds for the first few months where you have to tough, tight because you don’t get a lot of sleep. You have to push through many hard discoveries so really that corresponds to the real face of what you’re digging in entrepreneurship. No one knows you. You’re starting things and then things start to pick up after a few months which is the same with a young child because after 3 or 4 months you start having direction abilities. You start seeing the fruits basically of some of the effort you provide previously come through and then they accelerate 3 times. But what I’ll also say is the journey starts much more backwards than just the day that the child is born or the day you start a company. There’s a whole, probably a whole mental preparation which you need to get into to be ready. The people who don’t think they’re ready to have children at some point in their life which is totally acceptable because you need to be in the right position. And it’s the same thing with entrepreneurship. You don’t start a company like that. It’s something you have to be ready for, to prepare for, and it’s definitely something you can’t do on your own. You need a wife. You need the grandparents. You need the community. And maybe as well, you need the Dad podcast.
J: Yeah, you know it’s interesting you say that because that pre-journey I think is such an important point, at least in my experience is when you’re drawing down this path, it’s so important to have the resources to get advice. And everybody has their opinion but everybody’s journey is a little bit unique. And so I can imagine when you look at the parallels the venture and you’re leaving this great strategy consulting firm, I’m sure there were some people that may have said ‘are you sure that’s what you should be doing?’ right? Like why hasn’t it happened if it was actually a good idea. It’s not like the internet was just founded, right? And then you have the same thing with kids. Before you have a kid, people are telling you ‘this is when you have a kid. This is how you should have a kid. This is what you should do when you have a kid.’ And it’s great because you get a lot of great information but you have to also realize at the end of the day it’s your decision, right? And so you have to do what’s best for you all and how you make that decision is sometimes you take the advice but you may not heed it because it might not be the right thing for you. And so I’m sure leaving the company was a tough decision and some people may not have agreed to it but it’s funny how as you become successful, whatever your strategy I’m sure a lot of people are like ‘oh, that was the best idea ever,’ right? Especially those people that may have been detractors at the beginning of it.
T: I totally hear you. It’s really something that echoes, I’ve seen that when I left the strategy consulting industry after a tough time at business school and all the MBA stuff. It wasn’t the position I was supposed to be in. I was suppose to on paper work for a big multi-national or a big consulting firm and do my career on that and finish at 60 and then retire at somewhere in the countryside and that’s it. So I took a difficult decision at that time which was something kind of crazy but which I totally trusted in. and it’s true that that sensation of getting a lot of noise around this kind of risky thing you do at the start. It’s a tough one because a lot of entrepreneurs, they tell their story as well in some kind of way where they make it seem easy when they look back on it but that first phase which is clear your underground where you have to resist the temptation of all the alternatives you can have, the people who are legitimately pointing out things which may be wrong in your decision where you have to try and live with it through time and then be totally right with that. When things start to appear, when they start to look, and when the iceberg comes out the water, then the same people like ‘oh, actually you know, thing’s pretty good.’ I believe in the day is just divided to start the night but yeah, fair enough it’s something you get used to.
J: Yeah, you know, when you’re going down that path, it’s also to tie back into our strategy game conversation with video games, there are certain decisions and so the minute you start getting some momentum, people have probably come to you and say ‘hey Tim, this is what you should do.’ I’ll tell you even personally. I went to your website and I was flipping through, I haven’t went through every single page but within the first 5 pages, one thing I wanted to tell you was that this would be a great training tool for consulting firms. I thought people’s natural instinct is like they see a business and, I think it’s a helpful thing, right? Like they’re coming from a good place, but everybody has great ideas and you have to focus on. You have this much time, you have to focus on today’s problems or today’s kind of challenge and really, your own vision. And that’s the same thing with parent, right? Like when you’re raising a child, I wish I could have my daughter in every single class. I wish she could learn violin, and piano, and gymnastics, and martial arts. But you have a certain amount of resources and time and so you have to focus them. So I think there’s so many parallels there and everybody’s coming with ideas which may or may not be helpful but you have to really make decisions for yourself.
T: Absolutely. You know the listening part is one of the key things. I was discussing that actually with one of our leading authors. Actually, he is number 1 in the platform and a straight in guy in finance. And the other end of the spectrum when you don’t want to listen to these voices, to people who say ‘okay, well perhaps you could do. Perhaps you should fix this. Perhaps this could be a strategy.’ Well, you end up by going certainly in a dessert. You have to be in a place where people want to use your thing and it’s not what you think. It’s an aggregation of many different streams of insights. And so everyone who has an opinion on what you’re doing, should it be with parenting or with building a company, it’s something you have to listen to. You have no obligation to follow it but you have an obligation to listen to it. I think that’d be the key thing here. Because it does create, combined with other things, you know this with parenting of course. Maybe someone’s going to tell you ‘you know, your kids need to play an instrument. It’s really important for their brain.’ If your kid doesn’t go to music school where it’s not going to work out. Well, you can say ‘okay, cool. Maybe.’ You can take this into consideration and combine it with something else and in the end maybe you’ll get to something like coding which has the creative side of music and the ability to create something as well in the end. That’s useful for other people so yeah, completely agree on your point.
J: You know, when you say that, it brings up one of my very close friends. Her son, he works at one of the top technology companies now today and she would always tell me ‘Jonathan, you never grow up in spite of you not because of you.’ And I always laugh because she kind of had already went through that experience of raising a child when I was having my daughter. And so she is really kind of a source of insight and information. But what she meant by that is her son, he went through high school, great student, went to college, decided he wanted to get and art degree. And not like a graphics are degree, not anything technology related like a drawing art degree. He gets back, comes out of school, and has trouble finding a job or getting a career off the ground. And so then he goes and he takes this boot camp coding class and becomes a coder and just pay the bills at some small shop and becomes really good at it. And it always reminds me of like the Steve Jobs with the calligraphy and that type of the same mind thinking that he’s to technology. And so overtime he gets really good and then all of a sudden this technology company hires him and he’s went through the ranks. He’s been promoted probably half a dozen times now. He’s a senior person and he’s young. He can’t be older than 30 years old or so. And she said ‘Jonathan, how would I’ve ever known that’s what he was going to become.’ No indication until his early 20s that he even had a technology acumen, right? And so in some cases it kind of goes to something I think you were talking about with the educational system when we were exchanging notes like it’s killing the creativity. You just don’t know, right? So you have to kind of expose your kids to a bunch of things because otherwise the educational system is going to just end the people’s opinions of today’s current role of what we think the world’s going to be is going to put you in this narrow range. You might never get to explore the talent, the passion you have.
T: Yeah. So with you on that, I was listening this week to the podcast on education between the world renown Sir Ken Robinson who has a certain number of talks and other interventions and Guy Kawasaki who’s an entrepreneur. The two interested me because they have some common points but also very different ways of seeing the world. And it’s true that when they started talking about job market that it seems to be like today the key is not necessarily on the knowledge itself but more about how you manage to lead your kids to following their passion. One of the current headmaster in my former junior school in England, Anthony Hodson has this expression which is ‘my directive is to try in every child in junior school to find his or her star and try and follow that, whatever that star may be because it might lead to other stars or other things.’ We used to get that focus. And it seems like it can bring people very far. You were mentioning an example here but another good one is the founders of Airbnb unit, design students. They’re quite way, far away from what they ended up building but the path they were down on led them to be at the right place at the right time with the right kind of thinking to build something which no one could have anticipated or trained for. And that probably is what the whole debate about. How do you educate your kids in times where things are changing so fast and when the future is something much more uncertain than previous generations of dads may have thought?
J: When you’re talking about Sir Ken Robinson, it’s funny you said that. I followed him and I’ve been listening to his podcast. Do you find yourself now that you’re executing parenthood, so to speak and you’re raising a child, I know it’s early but that type of foresight into the schools like are you in educational process, do you find that you’re agreeing with his thoughts or are there certain things that you think you’ll implement and others that you feel may not be practical?
T: I think a good background there is I had kind of a mixed education because I was brought up both in England and France which are very different cultures and they have very different approaches to education and just living through life as a whole, as a professional. And Sir Ken Robinson comes with very Anglo-Saxon angle. He’s a big believer in the fact that there’s not one size fit all system for everyone and that’s something I totally agree with him on. The fact that you know there are other option to succeed in the world and not necessarily doing what the majority of people do. And on that we’ve, I’ve been (inaudible) with him. It’s something we’ve been discussing with my wife, saying okay, what is the type of education we want to give to our children given that we’re currently in France and the education there is totally different from the education I’d like to give my children because it’s a very old school. And Sir Ken Robinson has been helpful because he’s opened the eye to other systems which do exists in our country too, like Montessori schools for instance which seems to be a god fit for certain percentage. So it’s up to us then to, probably as parents to see we have time of course but to discover the personalities of each of our children and then orient them to different systems based on how we try and guess the way they’re working.
J: You mentioned the word old school, what did you mean by that?
T: So the French education system is, there’s probably a couple of places in the US like that is very top down kind of approach. So just to give you an illustration of that, so I was in a private school in England with an open mind to many different subjects. Maths wasn’t really necessarily above arts or sports. Everything had the same kind of coefficient, the same kind of achievement or applause from everyone specially during the end of year ceremony. So I was really open on that and I appreciated it lots. Everyone can build on their star. In France it’s totally different. There’s a very narrow focus on certain disciplines, notably mathematics, literature, and science, the 3 big ones. And the rest is kind of secondary and for people who don’t really mean anything to the system. So we tend to be very good at producing engineers, scientist, people with great expression. So we then build cohorts of professionals who are incredibly talented at managing organizations, at leading engineering projects, but definitely not good enough in terms of being on that frontier like you guys have in the US, of discovering new things, new molds, taking risks, applauding people who take risks and who failed. It’s something which is absolutely not in our culture and it dates all the way back to the way we’re educated which is you make a mistake, you get really shout at. It’s not tolerated.
J: It’s interesting you’re saying that because I do (inaudible) that the US itself has started to go down a similar path and not tolerate the mistakes. And hopefully that’s just my lone experience being in corporate America and with large companies with different hierarchy and organizational structure. One of the things that I find fascinating, and this is something that I actually try to take into my parenting, I work with a pretty high tier strategy consulting firm for some time and when there’s a mistake made, there wasn’t the look back to try to point fingers on fault. There was the question ‘okay, this happened. What did we learn from this and how will we move forward?’ And I found that the most fascinating fresh breath take because I had never seen that in my entire career, and I’ve been doing this for about 15 years. And I do that now with my daughter like when she makes a mistake, there’s no sense in sitting there recreating that scenario and saying you shouldn’t have done this or you shouldn’t have done that and I’m just pointing fingers. I can’t believe what impact that had. It had an impact. It happened. There’s not a lot you can do about it because you can’t control it. The only thing you can control now is what did you learn from that and not recreating that mistake. And I think when you start to ask the question from that view, it changes the dialogue a lot. And I agree like in the US like that’s one of the cornerstones was the innovation, the trial and error but the larger corporations, the corporate companies have kind of come in and people are afraid to make mistakes. They always feel like to be this perfect thing, politically correct. They have to make sure that everybody likes them which I think is another issue all in itself and it doesn’t necessarily mean you can be dislikable and have disagree. I think you can disagree and be likable at the same time. So it’s kind of interesting.
T: Yeah, absolutely. And I think for the US, I’ve listened to quite a number of people who kind of putting his own, and what’s happening with you guys and it seems to be that one of the reasons for getting closer to the system we have here in France is that the fact that the US civilization as a whole, the western civilization is maturing to a stage where we’re less in a position to have to take risks to move forward, and so we’re more focusing on maintaining things. And when your focus goes to maintaining things, you tend to measure them a lot more because you tend to unify systems. You tend to track them. You tend to compare yourself a lot as well to other nations, to other systems. And it’s true that the world rankings, all the tests that are taken to see are we better or not than the Chinese, than the Russian, than the French, than the British at different levels, at different ages seems to take away that open spirit and ability to not, it’s easy to measure for sure. It’s hard to measure success. It’s easy to measure grades. That’s what I would say.
J: Yeah. That’s a great quote. That’s probably going to be on one of our memes at some point. So you’re looking at Eloquens which is clearly an innovation in the industry and you’re doing this out of France which I think there’s anybody that is familiar with the country, and I love the country. I have so many great friends from France. But it’s not known to be the most business-friendly environment as far as that innovation and transformation goes but unless you’re doing it and you’re making it happen, has that been a challenge? Are you challenging the status quo? Or have you found that actually there are people there who are open to this type of transformation, it’s just not everybody are?
T: That’s a great question because there’s multiple levels there. The first one is we decided to (inaudible) the company in the US because the mindsets is more compatible with the vision that we have of the business, meaning sharing know-how so that everyone can have a reasonable access to it to go down their own journeys. That’s something in which in France would have been 10 times harder to work through. So the natural way for us was to say ‘okay, we’re a hundred percent compatible with the US so let’s go straight there. Let’s go with the people who are at the forefronts of the giving back spirits, of sharing knowledge, of also trying new things. These were things that were essential for us to start a business and that the US market’s definitely hit the mark, the French one didn’t. So in France we’ve been quite limited because we don’t have many attraction with France. Globally we’ve seen resistance, of course on a model because we are taking the classic consulting industry from a completely different angle. We’re basically giving away let’s say a top tier consulting or expert level best practices for a hundredth of 2 hundredth of a price of what you would actually have to pay to get it. And that’s kind of uberizing them a bit. It’s changing the status quo specially for SMEs as small business owners who don’t have the money nor the network to access such know-how. So we tend to go for people who agree on the vision first and then we hope that the old school market will follow us once we’ve shown the path and showed that it’s a compatible with the old way of doing things.
J: Yeah. It’s interesting because I live in that business and so I get it. (inaudible) my clients in some like consulting 50 years ago where you were a consultant but people that you were dealing with, your clients were, and so they worked at that same company for a few years and they haven’t had the outward perspective or independent perspective. Today’s environment, most of my clients were consultants. They know the drill. They know the framework. They know the methodologies and so what I think is important is your ability to execute on them in our business. So I tell people now like there’s a lot of great thinkers out there like yourself that have the templates and have the insights. I think those are fantastic. Where I try to come in, I’ll say ‘hey, you create that vision. I’ll help you make it come true.’ Because you always need people to execute on those, our points with those insights. So I think the people that still were holding that information hostage are probably going to be left behind, right?
T: Yeah. Absolutely. I agree with you on that. It’s just we’re organizing everyone’s role and refocusing on where the value actually is. For some top consulting and top consultants, they’re value is on the customization and it’s the implementation, it’s the execution, it’s the follow through and that is something that’s worth to pay for hundred percent. But to say that there is no access to the toolkit and to the methodologies for the others, to try and to get away for themselves is a bit of a shame and that’s been kind of the spirits saying well, it’s an entry point. We have actually many authors who are consultants. We have consultant firms. Some of them have actually big businesses and they use it as a stepping stone. It’s just on saying ‘hey, here’s something that can help you out. You want to help on the execution then? Or you can reach out to me and we can think about something together.’ Just extending the reach of the industry beyond helping hundreds of thousands of people away.
J: There’s so many parallels there to like modern-day parenting as well, right? Both (inaudible) approach will use that word interchangeably between your business as well as the education system. And I think there’s always going to be a place for education. I think that education is evolving, right? And there’s a reorganization of the roles, and the subjects, and the skills you want to develop. And even as parents like we’re constantly evolving. And it sounds like you’re big into looking at the educational system as well as TED Talks. Have you ever had a chance to listen to Jennifer Senior? She did a TED Talk back in 2014 when my daughter was born. And it was called “For Parents, Happiness is a very high bar.”
T: I haven’t. I’m just looking her up here. She seems really interesting. And you got translation into French.
J: Yeah, if you get a chance, take a listen to that one. That one changed my whole perspective on parenting. And I’ll tell you why, what she said is and she said it very simple and it was like that Gandhi moment where it kind of slaps you in the face, right? She said parenting is a crisis. It’s turned into a crisis. Everybody is stressed and nervous and has so much anxiety on they’re not getting their kid properly ready for their future. And all of us want to see our kids be more successful than us, right? And we all kind of looked at success in different ways but that’s always typically a goal is you want your kids to have a better platform than you did. She said people are not happy because even though their kids, if you have 2 parents that are engaged and you’re going through activities and you have them getting educated. These kids already have a starting place that’s ahead of 99.9% kids in the world in history too, right? And then she came up and she said ‘listen, you all probably have jobs in some type of corporation that’s doing technology, that’s doing some type of products,’ and she said ’20 or 30 years ago, you could have never anticipated that that’s the job that you would have.’ And she’s like ‘so what makes us think now that we can really anticipate what those kids are going to be doing for their careers in 20 to 30 years with the way technology is getting faster, not slower?’
T: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s a great point for all I mean dads out there just to say ‘hey, the education you received is something to transfer through the way things were done. For sure it’s got a lot of value. You have to try and filter things through but the future of what’s in front of us is something that’s got a lot of potential, that’s got a huge amount of uncertainty and which therefore needs focus our energies not to try and guess it because, well of course we can have fun doing that but more saying what are the essential skills, interpersonal qualities. How do we bring up children who are going to be able to make the right decisions in the future which will have different kinds of conformance that we can anticipate? But we won’t be able as much as previous generations had in the past able to contribute to helping them make these decisions. It’s a tougher thing for us because we have to change the angle from which were coming at for education.
J: And what kind of principles do you think that you’re, are going to be important for you to instill in your child?
T: That’s a great one. I’d say the first one I’m trying and which I will continue to pursue is curiosity, just being curios, learning things, having an open mind. I think that’s the key one because in that case you won’t be necessarily trying to absolutely follow what you think is best, what you think you want to do. But you’re going to be open to all the different opportunities that will come through in that situation. So curiosity is the choice one. Second, I’d say is resilience. So the fact of taking hits, having that form of courage to move towards the objective, knowing that the journey is going to be a lot of different kinds of pitfalls we should kind of say anticipate but there’s this urge to continue to go into a place that you’re discovering as you go. That’s a good one for you. So curiosity, resilience, and if I should pick a third one, I think I’d be something to do with the truth. So the fact of trying to orient actions towards what you think is best, what you think is true, what’s meaningful for you rather than trying to lie your way through things. And that’s a virtue I tend to appreciate in a lot of people who have honesty, who desperately want to look for that. We were talking early on about Joe Rogan. I think that’s one of the things which I appreciate a lot in him. He’s got that willingness to understand things, to try and capture the essence of it rather than trying to come to one single conclusion and say ‘okay, I’ve had my opinion on that,’ then next subject goes on the table, no. He’s got that ability to question multiple times the same subject until he comes to some kind of conclusion on it.
J: And, it goes back to something we talked about earlier into this discussion that you can be likable but you’re still disagreeing to somebody’s view and 2 people can be reasonable and have this agree to disagree but have a really intellectually curious conversation that’s founded on understanding rather than winning. And he does such a good job because he is open. He brings people on all the time where he may not agree with their perspective. I think him and Ben Shapiro were once, they had very different views but they love each other. They’re always going to throw a friendly job at the disagreement part but the other 90% is like man, he just loves the guy like they’re reasonable, right? That’s kind of lost. I think you mentioned something that you’re interested in as the focus of political correctness and I think somewhere along the line we’ve taken political correctness as being agreeable to everything as always like a mob kind of mentality versus let’s share ideas. I tend to be a contrary and so when I see a group of people going the wrong way even if I don’t agree with that other way, I’ll try to argue that way a little bit just so I can say that there’s no way the pendulum can be that far over, right? It always is somewhere in the middle, right?
T: Yeah, exactly. And that’s curiosity I think for a lot of people today. It will be for our kids too. I think if we go back to parenting on that. As always, we’re tougher than ever to bring our children to the world where ins some kind of way the freedom of speech and voicing out ideas or contradicting things that seem to be the majority position, that’s unquestionable, is you get put on the side, you get backlisted. I think that’s going to be tough so it’s all about the way you convey that critical thinking and how you can gain respect from not agreeing with people but still being likable as you said. It’s quite appalling in a way to see that some discussions are hard to have some in public. While there are plenty of reasonable people who, and I think it’s a majority of people too. It’s one of these subjects that’s a lot talked about. Social media tends to polarize things a lot in the extremes while the majority of people seem to be, are balanced and have mixed opinions on things and that’s the healthy part. And so how do you get that way people think about subjects back in to where they’re talked about. That’s a challenge for the tech guys like us to welcome.
J: And Tim, when you’re looking at stuff like that and I know you mentioned that you also come from a religious background as a roman catholic, you said truth is one of the key components. What’s your thoughts there because there’s a lot of kind of conviction in that religion but there’s also a lot of different views and so how are you managing that aspect and how do you think you’ll introduce that tradition and that religion into your child’s life?
T: Yes, great question. I’m asking as well so it’ll be interesting to think about it. An interesting point on that is a bit, when you look at someone like Ben Shapiro for instance who’s extremely religious so he’s got some strong points and some opinions but also he’s able to ask kind of things and debate things. I think it’s the key challenge for people who grew up with religious education, in my own personal experience, a catholic experience is to have a very integrative kind of approach to things. Meaning that the catholic tradition faith has in my view, incredible lessons. I know people like Jordan Peterson who isn’t catholic by faith but who studied the bible has managed to grab some very universal lessons for life which are applicable even today. So I think these are things that I want to push through to my children so that they have this wisdom which is being transferred from generation to generation through the figure of the old testament but also new testament and Jesus Christ into their life. So for me it’s kind of a tool kit to lead the world and also kind of a north star because it’s quite easy to maybe in some cases completely become blind because you don’t have some kind of torch guiding you through the darkness and I think that’s a great thing to have. But of course, as you mentioned maybe the extreme approach to Catholicism maybe a little bit more outdated in the sense that there are other things that we learned in the past couple of hundred years in the extreme reason as well that have to be thought into that. How do you explain to a child the appearance of certain religious principles with the recent scientific discoveries about the genome, about space, about various different kinds of behaviors and things that we’re discovering thanks to science? How would you articulate both together? There are a lot of people I tend to listen to and that’s the end of the spectrum who tend to disregard religion too much. They tend to consider as storytelling for kids and that’s it and it’s something you live without, maybe. But completely putting it on the side, and burning it, and forgetting it I think would be losing a huge part of the human journey of what we’re trying to aim for. I think that for a lot of dads especially, a topic here to address when you have your children who ask you extensive questions, how do you answer that? Previously, it was easy. You got to send him out the bible. You send them to see a priest, and viola you had the answer. But now it’s harder. So that goes back to the subject about listening, about understanding, about having discussions around things, and accepting that your approach on very deep things can evolve with time and you have to nourish them progressively and contradict yourself and laugh to be wrong.
J: And is your wife of the same mindset and same religious background, you have the same approach, same philosophy on this?
T: Yeah, absolutely. We both come from very old families in France so we have the educational tradition but also the catholic tradition in our veins. And we share the same vision on things. We have different approaches of course on some specific things. So that tends to be in our case pretty easy because we have less different kinds of discrepancies there. But even with that, we tend to have a lot of different viewpoints on how to think about things and it’s also things that I guess we talk a lot about the family with this. As a couple, how do you discuss such issues as a couple because if the child goes and sees dad, dad gives and answer and mom gives a different answer? That’s cool but it also a challenge. So how do you discuss that as a couple? You were up early, he went and seen us and asks us what’s after life for instance because his grandfather died. How do we answer that question? Well, I give him this answer. What answer did you give him? Well, I gave him that one. Okay, cool then. And how do you continue discussion as a couple but how you continue discussion with a child as well every time to get a sense of what the answer could be which you don’t by yourself necessarily know.
J: Well, hang on friend because those will be fast and furious and then very volume. As you think when you go into this parenting journey, that you’re always going to be line and you’re going to have time to have a discussion and make sure that everybody’s looking at it the same way. That goes out the window real quick once they start coming with you. They come with a lot more questions than you do have time to really discuss and make sure you have a great answer or sometimes you have a bad answer, sometimes there’s no answer, right?
T: Yeah. That’s the hardest ones. The hardest ones is when there’s no answer.
J: And you know what? Something that I think coming from, I love the word you use like old school like this generation of parenting is very different. It’s almost modernized. And our parents, it goes back to even in the way information flowed and knowledge flowed, for most of history knowledge and information flowed based on experience and age, right? you got older, you learn more. They said that, I’d been in technology and the web and coding, that was one of the first times in history that all of a sudden, a 20-year-old knows more than a 60-year-old in the same subject, right? Because now somebody needs to come to them for help, that 60-year-old to do something they want to do for their business. So that was kind of really transformation period. And when I talk to my daughter, I’ve come to realize like sometimes the answer is I don’t know. I don’t know the answer. She’s 5 years old. She asks me a question, I said let me look into it and that’s okay. I think that we always feel that we have to have the answer and we know all but when you start to accept that your kids are just going to have access to information that maybe you don’t even have, it’s okay.
T: Yeah, exactly. And the answer I don’t know is one to cherish because it’s a generational gap that we’re experiencing now which will probably be increasing with time with our children. The big challenge indeed is that we were built as human species around the fact that all the people are a source of wisdom. They have the experience to share and learn and there’s a certain attitude to that. And for some subjects, because that’s not true for all subjects of course, are reversed and that’s definitely completely changing the way we’re talking about certain topics. As a father sometimes it’s true, it’s quite probably destabilizing to see a child, 12 teach you something that’s of uttermost importance for you. It’s unique. It’s never happened in history. Our brains and bodies are not adapted to that. We have to fight through it.
J: And even the technical detail and granularity, they learn about subjects. My daughter turns 6 on Wednesday and we were doing a discussion and we actually have our own podcast. She does this video podcast called Juice with Milan. It’s a 10-minute short volume podcast we do weekly on current day stuff and things top of her mind. But she taught me that Abraham Lincoln was a decorated wrestler. And he’s enshrined in a wrestling hall of fame. I never knew that. I’m 38 years old. I never knew that knowledge. When you talk about Abraham Lincoln when I was growing up, that wasn’t something that came up. And daughter came and say ‘did you know he was a wrestler?’ Because she’s into the jujitsu. And I said ‘no, I had no idea.’ So it’s amazing like they’re just, the amount of information, it’s kind of like whenever we were younger and the internet came out and all of a sudden, you had access to at that time it was Ask Jeeves or Yahoo. And you were just able to learn so much so quickly. Personally, having to go and read a 300-page book that was written by 1 person.
T: Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. And who knows what the future will be like for our kids on that. it’s probably going to be, the good news is that at least we know in terms of mindset what to expect which probably wasn’t the case of necessarily, of our parents for instance, who really didn’t see the internet coming, really not. And we live with it now so we know what to expect from it but we know for sure there’ll be something else or other things that will come in the future where we will completely out of the blue, we’ll learn new things on things we thought were true, where positions will be challenged. And another source for instance, the advent of AI globally. That form of intelligence if that can be qualified like that is kind of a third parameter in the discussion here between a father and son, father and daughter. You have that third person or third entity out there who’s going to be challenging both positions. And that’s going to be new as well to integrate.
J: Yeah, and you know Tim, you have such a broad interspace. You’ve lived all over the world. You’ve experience entrepreneurship and you clearly have an eye for where industries are going so you have that kind of vision that sees things before media becomes mainstream or common knowledge. If you look at that from a parenting perspective, if you are going to do some crystal ball you use for a second, what do you think are some of those things that are coming down the pipe that are going to be real challenges or real opportunities for a parent to start to expose your children to or think about?
T: Yeah, that’s a great question. First, it’s really tough to see through these kinds of things. On a personal base, I like to try and guess work and see that all things that can grow to big trends later on. But I’m wrong most of the time, first disclaimer, which is part of the job.
J: That’s also a great quality to have to be able to say in a relationship and especially when you have a kid. So it sounds like you’re been trained well there.
T: Yeah. No, no. It’s true but it’s different from what I would have expected to say. What I may say here will most likely be wrong but the exercises interesting to carry forward. But one of the things I’d say is definitely in terms of the education, that’s what I’d do for us. I don’t know, it may be not applicable for others but to really get the children in the right starting grounds to be in the right position to grasp whatever will be new out there tomorrow and to move forward and learn it quickly so that they can then use it to follow whatever star they have out there. So I’d say what the bigger devices would be first to keep an open radar at things, on subjects such as AI, machine learning, social engineering as well. There are subjects like that which will significantly change nature of certain jobs but also tech fields, genetic engineering is a big one we don’t talk about a lot. All these design fields, incredible places to go to. And maybe one of the things I try to foster as well despite, you know that focus on technology which is cool, is also trying to keep our children, it’s something I experienced and which I, as I said through our email exchange, close as well to the reality of things, so building things with your hands, being out there in nature, being exposed to these things which you can’t google your way through. So I push parents to try and put their kids in zones like that where they know they’re going to be challenged by some of the key things we grew up as human beings with time. There’s probably other examples about that, for instance boy scouts. It’s great for young guys. These kinds of grounds where you get to be out there in the forest, to build stuff with your hands out of woods, be with other kids and play games, completely out there. They’re just a little bit focusing on your human skills and interaction abilities with things around you, to have deep roots.
J: When you look at your career so far, do you think you’ll be able to resist the urge to push your kids down to a safe path of go, get educated, get the secondary degrees and then go get a job or will you encourage entrepreneurship for them?
T: That’s a really good one. It was actually, I believe a conversation of Guy Kawasaki and Sir Ken Robinson had. They were saying there’s a lot of people who listen for instance to Sir Ken Robinson’s talks and who agree with him and then when it gets to actually doing that with their families, they do push their children back into the classic group because in the end you do have to have an education, you have to go to university, you have to have your MBA and get a job, real job because that’s how life works. And it’s for sure and I’m now saying with great antsy it is a temptation. If I’m here today in a position to create a business and to lead through the future, maybe the future thinks that I’ll do tomorrow. It’s because of the kind of a classic education I received. So I can definitely see a lot of value in replicating it. And it will be a big temptation and a great creativity exercise to try and weave that with a completely different approach which neither my wife or myself have received. And I’ve seen that a bit with notably my, actually heads up on him, my wife’s father, who’s had a business as well in the airspace. He used to build some very important parts so he had a factory and everything and he has 4 daughters, one of them being my wife and he gave them a really interesting education which is quite out of the norm in our culture and family background. Well, he tried to give his girls real sense of autonomy and risk taking in little decisions such as if they want something, well, if possible trying so that they do it a hundred percent on their own so pushing them out of their comfort zone. If they want to build something, he’ll give them the tools to do it. So exploring that. So what I’m saying ‘okay well you have an idea, you want to do something? Okay, go ahead do it. I’ll support you. I’ll be there for you but you’re going to lead through that.’ So here are the things that I like to weave in into the classic approach. And then who knows? If it’s going to be as well the education system each different child will go through and whatever we learn on the way, the new techniques from other parents, from maybe some new things brought to ourselves without any form of proof.
J: Yeah, I come from a pretty humble background and so I was raised by a single mother of 6 with a high school education. For her, the classical system was the goal like get me to college. The batch, just getting into college was a success. Finishing my bachelors was a success. Any advanced degree has been icing on the cake. My wife in similar fashion, she immigrated from Columbia and education had been always number 1 priority for her, and the same thing, get to college and she work nights and everything to get through her bachelors and then she ended up getting an executive MBA. And so we both have decent educational credentials but we really can f@#$ the classical system in some ways. We definitely pay attention to it. Reading’s important to us. Mathematics is important to us but we put my daughter in an immersion Mandarin school where she’s essentially going to school in New York City but she could have been switching it out with Beijing, 7 hours a day in Mandarin. And one of the reasons why is because for us we felt like being exposed to multiple languages. And so my daughter is fluent in Spanish and Mandarin and English. If it’s going to be more powerful for her to understand cultures, connect with people, communicate than any standardized test. So we really went through that but it’s not easy. I mean there’s so many times we’ve second guessed all language program or the immersion or are we making the right choice. You look at another school and they got these great scores and standardized test, and so is that where we should be focusing? But I think we’ve made the right decision but it takes courage because it is against kind of the grand in the way that you face.
T: Yeah, that’s for sure. And there’s another promise as well. Your children in themselves might not as well necessarily agree with the things that you’re putting forward for them, and sometimes you do have to push your way through that. For instance, you know if your daughter, I don’t know if she hates or loves her Mandarin classes but you do have try and say ‘okay, there’s pressure both from the outside and both from my kids to not do this but I have this intuition that it’s something that’s in the end good for them as well so I’ll try and push through it.
J: You know, it’s kind of interesting that kids are so resilient. And we dropped this kid in at 3 years old into this immersion school where the teachers literally will not talk English. And at 3 years old she got thrown into Mandarin. She got very little exposure to it with my wife speaking Spanish all the time, I’m speaking English. And now at this point she’s so comfortable as she sings most of her songs. She wants to watch tv. She knows how to write characters and read. And it’s just incredible to watch her progress but it got me, (inaudible) back to like the things that we talked about in this podcast like entrepreneurship and the struggles and getting ready for the journey and kind of the naysayers and the detractors, when we first started, people looked at us in a way like what are you doing? That was so completely different than the traditional let’s get this kid into a certain school and try to get the one with the best standardized test schools. And now it’s funny because when I post videos of her speaking and singing in Mandarin, the same naysayers come back and they’re like ‘wow that’s incredible. She’s got some skills.’ Sometimes you just have to trust yourself and I’m sure like at the time back to your kind of religious roots and that conviction, I came from a catholic background. I would hardly call that we’re practicing. My wife is definitely more involved. We’re (inaudible) my daughter and letting her make the choices as she goes. But for me like one of the biggest things is sometimes you have to go through the fire to get to the end, that initial part. It’s a long journey in a dessert. And I used to read a lot, I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten a hold of these books, the John Maxwell leadership books. He takes like the biblical principles and applies those to business. It’s just fortitude, and resilience, and going against the common thought, and all those things I think serve you well.
T: Yeah. I totally agree with you. And as we’re talking about political correctness, another big subject is how to, a lot of kids who come out of college and universities, from what I can see the people we have in our team, or in my team they’re pretty tough. It’s okay but in a lot of students who come out in the workforce, they seem to discover the toughness of life a lot. Unfortunately, in business, you don’t have an award for participating. You don’t have an award for being, it’s completely different world. And I have got this feeling that one of the things, and especially I guess something for dads here is to teach their children the fact that’s unfortunately but it’s there that life has its suffering. Things which if you want to get somewhere, well you only have to break some muscles. You have to accept that it’s a part of life and it’s something that you can manage. And it seems like a lot of people are running away from that and therefore missing the opportunity to go where they want to go instead of taking the responsibility on their shoulder and moving forward. And it’s definitely something I’d like to transfer first to my kids (inaudible) to reason and saying ‘hey, want to get somewhere or want to do something? Well, you have to feel it. You have to feel the effort. I might tie it a bit as well to the fat that I played 20 years of rugby which kind of toughen me up on that. But there’re somethings you have to work tough through.
J: Yeah, man. You know, it’s funny. We didn’t get through I think a quarter of the stuff that you’re involved in. I know, I’ve been watching the clock and thinking goodness, we could run a 4 hour in here so I’m gonna have to ask you and say return guest. I hope that you’d enjoyed it and you’re open to that because there’s so much more, and you hit the rugby. We haven’t even started down that. And I’m sure there’s a lot of life’s lessons that you’re going to apply to parenting with that. It’s interesting though you said about thing being rough. My daughter’s going through learning the violin right now. And learning the violin maybe one of the most brutal activities I’ve ever watched a kid have to go through. They spend the first 3 months just learning to pick the violin up and holding it correctly. And if you’re 5 years old I don’t know how anybody’s become a violinist because I would’ve quit after the first day. It’s so boring. And yesterday she had a rough class. It was just one of those things where you just can’t do anything right. and I came over to her and she’s pretty bummed, and I said ‘you know what? Out of everything you’ve accomplished and all the great days you’ve had in your other activities like I’m so proud of you today more than anything because you didn’t quit the class. You didn’t get frustrated. The teacher was frustrated. You were kind of dispirited but you kept going, you kept trying and you finished the class. And those I think are kind of micro decisions or micro activities that go up over time and that’s the grit mentality. You brought up like the kid’s challenging and entrepreneurship and one of the things that I think that people forget is every day’s kind of an issue, right? Like for us at the Dad Corp, we spent year trying to figure out how to commercialize anything. And once we commercialize the next day we have a problem, the minute the next day was like how do you scale it or how to deliver it? So people start buying stuff overnight and we’re like ‘oh, my goodness like this is amazing that money coming through,’ and now we’re like how do we get operations or everything’s kind of a new problem or a new challenge. On internet and social media, I think it’s so easy to see somebody who updated their title or took a vacation. You always see the end result but you don’t see that kind of struggle day in and day out to get to that end result.
T: Yeah, and it’s sometimes unexplainable there’s things like that. it’s not a very clickbaity story to tell where the real muscle gets done for businesses. Even with close friends, some of these naysayers, et cetera. It’s hard to tell them really what you went through. And the hardest part to that is even if you did give a shot at it, for those who haven’t lived it, it’s impossible to understand because you have to kind of keep with the end photo like after raise and so, okay, right. They won’t understand what happened before but here it is and if I can transfer that wisdom, what I learned to other people in some kind of form which is in a way what my good friend Antoine is doing with me. So he’s not telling me, he’s not showing me his end pictures but he’s teaching me on the way, you know ‘hey, this thing it reminds me of this situation where I wish I was in so we can do this. So there is transferability of that know-how on the way and other ways.
J: That’s wonderful, yeah. I mean it sounds like you’ve hooked up with an incredible entrepreneur and it sounds like that’s starting an accelerator we call cheat codes in life. Sometimes you get those cheat codes, right? The old Contra cheat code, well that’s it. Every new adventure, every new business, I’m trying to start a couple of different ones along the way and every one presents a certain challenge. I’m sure you’re solving new problems that even he hasn’t faced before. And so man, I will ask you like what if your son, and I know you said that you’re having many more so it sounds like you had a good first year. It took us a couple of years to even think about a second one. What will you think about like what you want your kids to remember you by, one day when they’re sitting beside a campfire or at home when they’re talking about their dad, what would you want them to say?
T: Really, really interesting question to think. And I’d say I’d love them to say that dad is someone who had always had my back in things I tried to do and who’s being there to discuss with me on questions or problems I couldn’t figure a way out of. I’d say that’s really the 2 things I’d like to be remembered for. And maybe a third thing would be the fact of, they’d say that I opened them up to new things that they would have never done themselves, maybe. So that explorer mindset.
J: That’s awesome. One of the things that I hear from interview and I think it’s probably the key part of one of the reasons why we built this, my partner and I which is being engaged and being there for them in a time in need or in a time of one direction or advice. And that’s they key, right? Just being there and helping them through the challenges because I think that’s always what as a father and you know, has her own life having somebody that’s trusted (crosstalk) advisor but a trusted resource, right?
T: Yeah, and being a father doesn’t stop at age 18 or 21 depending on where you live. It’s your father your whole life even when your son is 60 and you’re 90 years old, you’re still a father and your son may still need a bit of your thoughts and time. So there’s a whole phase as well which we tend to overlook a bit sometimes which is when our children are grownups all the efforts and mindsets that will have been done in the early childhood will also have fruits in that period of time when some major decisions have to be taken.
J: You have no idea, man. I can relate to that so much. My mother is 80 and just the other day, she was talking about how hard this whole quarantine has been on to young kids. She’s like people like yourself who just out of college. I’m like ‘mom, I’m almost 40 years old.’ I hardly consider myself, I’m halfway done with my career. I think as a parent you always look at your kid, as I refer to my daughter as like my little baby and she’s a child. Hang on because when you look at your son now, somebody told me this and I couldn’t imagine it now I understand it is a few years from now you’ll have a hard time remembering or envisioning them that small. You look at picture and you’d be like I can’t even remember like that kid that small. It’s amazing. So listen, as far as getting it out so you can put your son to bed which is the most important thing,
T: Oh, yes.
J: Yeah. Where can people follow you? If people want to hear more about Eloquens and just your overall activity, where can people find you?
T: Yeah, absolutely. I’m usually most active on LinkedIn. That’s where people can find me easily. I’m really open to connections and discussing with people so you know, hey, if anyone wants to have a chat or discuss the various topics we covered, I’d be happy to, just drop the reason for connecting and I’d be happy to. And otherwise for those who are interested in strategy consulting kind of resources for their business’ idea. I do tend to review probably some. Also on Eloquens, on my own company so that’s another place to follow me.
J: Great. And then eloquens.com is your website of your business, right?
T: Yeah. Eloquens, eloquens.com. So it comes from the Latin eloquent. We took away the T and put an S instead so, yeah. That’s it.
J: Well, man, I can’t wait to get you back on here. I feel like there’s 2 or 3 more hours of discussions that we haven’t even. It has been great to meet you for the first time. That’s been a while (crosstalk)
T: Likewise.
J: Talking with essentially strangers with no video.
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