Allen Gannett, Ex-CEO Track Mavin | Forbes & Inc 30 Under 30

Welcome to the success story podcast, I'm your host, Scott Clary. On this podcast, I have candid interviews with execs, celebrities, politicians, and other notable figures, all who have achieved success through both wins and losses, to learn more about their life, their ideas, and their insights. I sit down with leaders and mentors and unpack their story to help pass those lessons onto others through both experiences and tactical strategy for business professionals, entrepreneurs, and everyone in between. Without further ado, another episode of the success story podcast. Thanks again for joining me. I have Alan Gannett with me. He is the founder of Track Maven, founder and CEO. It was a marketing analytics platform whose clients included Microsoft, Marriott, Sachs Fifth, Home Depot, Honda, and GE. Now in 2018, it merged with Skyward, which is a leading content marketing platform. So he is now, I guess, somewhat retired from the business he built. He has been named a 30 under 30 on both Inc. and Forbes. He's a contributor for Fast Company, released a book called The Creative Curve, which came out in June 2018. The book was featured on CNBC Forbes, numerous podcasts, has been picked up and translated into seven other languages. And the most important fact that I pulled out of his bio was that he was once a very pitiful runner-up on Wheel of Fortune, which made me laugh when I read that. But thanks for sitting down, excited to sort of understand your story. You've done a lot. You've accomplished a lot. You're still relatively young, so I appreciate the insight in a few minutes you're giving. Yeah, thanks for having me, man. Yeah, no. So like walk me through, you know, you built up a company. You exited. Now you're just doing your thing after writing one book. You said you're working on another one. Where did your story come from? What did you, you know, how did you start Track Maven? Let's start. Yeah, totally. And yeah, so Track Maven was a fun, ran for six and a half years, we did this merger. And what's interesting about a merger, which is slightly different, we can talk more about it than like an exit, is really it's like the story sort of continues, right? There's some actual like practical differences that, um, mergers actually happen sort of start up to more than I think sometimes some of the folklore is, but, um, you know, and so that was a really interesting experience too, just staying on for a year and a half afterwards as part of the executive of my bigger company. Um, yeah, so my background is I started getting digital marketing, I was in college. And so I went into college thinking that I wanted to become a lawyer. Um, and as I got into college, and I started meeting people who are lawyers, I was like, I do not want to be a lawyer, like there's never been a profession where more people are like, don't do this. And I'm like, that is like, I, you know, I'll take you out your word. If you're doing it for 30 years, you say don't do this, like God bless, right? And so I was like, what am I going to do? What am I interested in? And at the time, this was around, um, I entered college in 2009. And so this is around the time that the movie, the social network came out. There was some, there's a lot of excitement around sort of digital technology and social networks, all stuff. Um, and I just was like, well, maybe it's tech, you know, I like the speed of it. I like how fast things are. And so I started a company in college that did digital marketing, um, through a bunch of different web properties for colleges, universities. And we built Facebook apps and it all sorts of things. And it wasn't a very good business for a lot of reasons. Um, but I got really interested in digital marketing and how to build audiences online and not just the sort of micro tactical aspects, but also more macro sort of what's going on when you build an online community. Um, and so sort of through doing that in college, I sort of met a lot of people locally and I had a, I made a friend with this entrepreneur who's much over to me as a 10 years old to me. So I guess that's a bad job, older and, um, he recruited me to come be a CMO of his, um, small venture back startup. He was doing a new startup. He had done a company before. And so I did that never having managed to before was my first job. Um, and I sort of realized a few things like one, I don't like working for other people. So I was like a good life lesson to learn, um, even that he was like, great manager. I just don't like it. Uh, and then two, I learned that there was like a lot of problems in digital marketing at the time. This was 2012 where there was just like, not enough like there's all this data being created, but the data wasn't actually very actionable. It was hard to gather as hard to turn into insight. And so track maven started out of this desire, um, to make data much more actionable for marketers. And so started a company in 2012, um, and, uh, the time that we did a merger was about 50, 55 employees, um, and so sort of had a really interesting, I think an interesting progression of like the company grew as I was also growing up, um, and that was often for better and for worse. So that's, and just to clarify, I just want to make sure that I get the timeline right. Um, so that was with, with that entrepreneur, or this is track maven was 100% on your own. Yeah. As I started as a so long entrepreneur, he invested in it, but I started as a so long entrepreneur, uh, solo founder, yeah, which I, I think is probably like, not the right decision looking back, but also not as wrong with decisions, I think people tend to, I think there's some like mythology around being a solo founder, being impossible. I don't think it's impossible, right? Amazon has a solo founder, clearly at work. I just think it's different, um, and maybe less fun, um, stressful and, and, and just a ton of work and you don't have that, you don't have a resource like an outlet to, yeah, and I think that's one of the things, one of the things as your company grows is that there's just sort of divided by like loneliness at the top. And I think when you have a co-founder, you have someone who is very much in the same sort of position as you, you're going to have a level of frankness that is hard to have as the company gets bigger in the same way. And so that's why I think it's more of like, it's less fun when you don't have a co-founder, a little bit more difficult. But I think the lack of sort of enjoyment is actually more important. So, so two things I'm curious about and you can decide which one to, to go after first. One of them, I'm just curious about your entrepreneurial journey and like sort of lessons you've learned as you grew up quite literally as you were growing your company. But the other one, I'm curious about the problems that track Maven was solving and have we seen, uh, the, the marketing, I guess, I don't know, culture, atmosphere, nuances, status quo, uh, progress to the point where those problems have been solved. Like what, like what is the current state of marketing in 2020? And that's a loaded question. So, I mean, I can answer that one first and that one to me is pretty easy. Where I mean, digital marketing has become, uh, I believe the dictionary definition is, you know, a cluster, you know, insert here. Um, we're, it's basically there's all these channels and, um, sort of what works, the digital marketing is changing very rapidly and all the time. And so keeping up with that is incredibly time consuming and expensive. The result has been, you know, when I started track Maven, they do these marketing landscapes, um, and at the time there was 150 marketing technology vendors. And the latest version I saw, this is probably out of date because I haven't been, you know, in this for a little bit, uh, there's 7,800 marketing technology vendors. So imagine that, right? Which doesn't 12th is today going from 150 marketing technology vendors to 7,800. And so that fundamentally I think represents the digital marketing has just become completely chaotic and crazy. And now what you're seeing is that there's a move by a lot of marketers to consolidate tools to sort of come back to simplicity. Let's do less things. Let's do them well instead of trying to do everything, um, because that's, you know, it ends up with how you have 7,800 tools. And so the marketing landscape, I think, is a place where it's really hard to build a marketing technology company right now because a lot of spend is moving towards more consolidated solutions. It's really hard to build a consolidated solution as a startup. First of all, you think about it's much easier to build a very specific feature and then over time grow. But it's hard to come in and say, I'm going to, you know, compete with Marquetto or I'm going to compete with sprinkler. Um, sorry, you're asking. No, no, I was that was that was actually going to be my question. So when you say like the, the, the, the, the, the solutions that are basically the one stop shop in the 2020 landscape, that is like a Marquetto. And that's really what, that's what people are gravitating towards now. But we're all, they're all slightly different. So you think about like what's interesting in marketing technology is there's these people building these horizontal solutions and they're all coming from it from different origin points. So Marquetto started sort of from email sprinkler started with really like social customer support. Um, there's folks like Sision who started with PR monitoring and just adding more and more things. And so everyone is sort of coming out from different angle, but they're all trying to build this very horizontal sort of marking technology company. Now, so, so this is what you've seen sort of the current marketing landscape gravitate towards. Um, and one other thing that I wanted to understand just in terms of the current landscape, you mentioned that you want to simplify, you want to double down on what works, but you also mentioned something earlier that I thought was very interesting. You always understood the macro or the community aspect. What is the higher level theme that companies are trying to tap into that works? Is it community? Is that the takeaway that people are trying to gravitate towards and understand? I'd say those sort of two things. One is that ultimately all marketing is about building audience and converting that audience, right? And if you simplify everything to that, if you can make it all much simpler, where anytime there's a new channel, anytime there's a new tactic, it's really is this either helping you build audience or is this helping me convert? That's sort of one macro point and make the other macro point and make is that you can think about digital marketing as a sort of stock market for attention, where what people find is like how marketers build really valuable big brands, they tend to find sort of like asymmetry in the sort of cost to value various channels. And as they find that, what happens is other marketers sort of see them doing that they start trying it works for them. And that big, you know, bids up the price and it becomes more expensive. So you can take this with any sort of marketing technique about content marketing. When content marketing first was starting, it was much, much easier to get attention because there's a lot less people. Now every startup, you know, has a blog, they're doing content marketing. So if you think about it as your consumers attention, sort of being the thing you're trying to get, well, it's much harder than it was before. Similarly, you see, anytime there's a new big social network that emerges, it's much easier to build an audience, sort of early in the development of that social network, think about TikTok right now versus trying to build an Instagram audience, right? And over time, as more people come into that tactic, it becomes more, more difficult. And so the result is that marketers who are successful from a long term career perspective are very good at constantly doing what's working and experimenting with things that might be the next main thing because it's constantly shifting and because, you know, big companies come into these channels and just make them privately expensive at some point. And that is, I guess, that is the strategy for somebody who's looking to make headway into the market. It's like you mentioned, so you, you double down on what is traditional and what works. And that's almost like the status quo. That's like what you have to do. It's like a pay to play. You have to be good at the certain things that people are all good at. But then do you see more, I guess, startup or, or I guess, I don't know, people pushing the envelope on marketing in terms of trying to get things into new environments like TikTok. Is that more of a trend with companies that are trying to get some, some headway or is it something that traditional like Fortune 500, Fortune 100 companies are making a move on as well? I think you tend to see it that sort of competitive or emerging companies tend to be better at that, but you're also seeing the good marketers at big companies are good at that too, right? It's not just about, it's not just about the small startups. And so I think that's an interesting, that's like an interesting point. And, you know, I think if you're a marketer and you're thinking about your career, like that is going to serve you really well, whether you're at a big company or small company, because if you're at a big company, you know, and you start experimenting on things that take off, you're going to get a lot of credit, a lot of reward, a lot of all these things for sort of being a little bit ahead of the curve. So I think no matter where you are as a marketer, it's valuable. But yeah, traditionally, the sort of emerging businesses are the ones who tend to be better at it. And, and talking about the first book that you wrote, the Creative Curve, what is that, what is that book about? What is that? Yeah. So the creative curve, for those of you listening, I was just holding it up on the video, but it's a book, it's a book all about this question that I got really fascinated with, which is like, can you learn to become more creative? And the reason I got really into it is that we were working with all these marketers and we were, you know, we have all their data and we would show them like actually there's a lot of like patterns to what your customers like. And there's a lot of like systems thinking you can apply to how you create things, what stories you tell, what content you create. And yet, when you talk to marketers, they'd say things like, well, I'm just not that creative. I can't do that. Or, you know, that's just not me. I have to hire an agency to help me with, you know, creative stuff. And I just, you know, I grew up in New Jersey, I get kind of frustrated. I was just thought that was sort of all ridiculous thing. I was like, no, like you could definitely do this. And so I started researching sort of like people's opinions and views on creativity. And it's sort of morphed over time to what ended up being the sort of three year nights and weekend research project around diving into like, what is creativity really? And how can we learn it? And so the first half of the book is looking at the history and science of creativity and a lot of the myths around creativity because there's a lot of myths. And the second half is a interview to about 25 living creative greats, ranging from Michelin star chefs to, you know, start up moguls like Alexis Hanyan to songwriters like Pasadam Paul, who did, you know, greatest showmen and deer and handsome Ann Law Land, right? And going through their stories and actually teasing out four patterns of things they did to enhance their creativity and explain what those things are and the science behind them. And yeah, so the book is sort of part myth busting, part actionable guy to creativity. Because I think that myth busting piece is what's inhibiting a lot of the companies from getting into some of these emerging platforms and trying new things. And I think that that's probably an inhibitor, what I'm thinking about, I'm not saying it clearly, but what I'm thinking about is when a company is saying, I don't know how to get on the TikTok, I don't know how to convert my product into something that can be communicated via a 60 second or 15 second video. So is that really what, you know, the creative curve breaking down these myths about how to become creative? Is that really something that can be parlayed into an effective marketing? I don't know. Oh, yeah. I mean, definitely, you know, I mean, I'll give you one, one small example. One of the things I think really throws people for a loop is consumer trends. Like why are certain things popular when they're popular, right? If that really gets people like, it feels really sort of squishy and intangible, but the reality is we actually have all sorts of amazing sociology and psychology research that tells us exactly why consumer trends happen. And like I'll give you an example for one of the most prominent forces. It's as humans, we have these two sort of urges, I like to call them, that we've developed over time. One is that our brain has realized, it's sort of coded, that things that we see that are familiar represent safety, right? So if you think about, you know, when you see your door for home, you're like safe place. If you see a door that is the same physical door, but it's a place you've never been before, your brain's on, what's behind that door could be potentially sort of risky. And so merely the fact that something's more familiar changes what we think about. And so familiarity breeds this idea of safety. As a result, we also tend to fear things that are unfamiliar because we're like, what's there? So that's one urge we have. The other urge that's really important to understand with consumer trends is that we've also developed this novelty seeking behavior where when our brain sees something new, it gives it what's called a novelty bonus, which is basically this sort of like perceived benefit to that. Where it's like, okay, that piece of fruit that I've never seen before kind of looks like a weird strawberry. Oh, well, like I should try eating that because it might actually be delicious, right? It might be, you know, breakfast, think about when people were hunter-gatherers. So it's interesting, these two things are contradictions, right? Like literally, I just told you like, familiarity breeds, safety, novelty breeds, pursue, that doesn't make sense. Like those are contradictions. What it is, is our brainually is constantly looking for things, blend of the familiar in the novel. We like things that are fear enough to be safe, but yet novel enough to be new. So think about, if you saw a berry when you were hunter-gatherer, that was sort of like a weird strawberry, you'd be like, okay, I'm going to eat that. It's probably delicious. If you saw a berry look nothing like anything you've ever seen before, you might be like, a little bit too much, like it might be poisonous, I'm going to leave it be. And so as a result, what you find with consumer trends is that, all over and over again, there's all these studies that basically show that the things that people like, things that have one foot in the familiar and one foot in the new. And so if you think about like Apple, I think Apple's a great example of this. Apple we think about is like sort of radical innovation, but actually no, like that's not the story of Apple. If you look at Apple in the 90s, when they released their first tablet device, the Apple Newton, it was a spectacular failure. People were like, this is crazy, I don't want this. But then fast forward to today, the iPad tablet computer is like wildly successful. And you think about it, like getting to the point where the iPad would be adopted by consumer was actually very incremental, right? So like the iPad was an iPhone without a phone. The iPhone was an iPod with a thumb. The iPod was a better MP3 player, right? So like if you actually look at a lot of creative success stories, which will tend to find is that the ones that are successful adopted by consumers tend to be much more incremental than we realize because we have those two urges that pursue the familiar and that pursue the novel that coexist. I really, that's that's very insightful. And it makes a lot of sense. Now I'm just wondering for somebody who is bringing a new product to market, like you mentioned with with Apple, the familiar and the novel do contradict. So how do you strike that balance when you're trying to, you know, go into a blue ocean, you don't have a reference point as a business. So yeah, great question. And this is where a lot of entrepreneurs really are tricky because they build what is in their mind the most advanced or the best set of features, not actually the right thing to do. And the book I tell the story, campus network, which was a social network art month before Facebook at Columbia University by student body president went viral on Columbia's campus. The co-founders it took off much like the Facebook co-founders did in order to focus on it for a while. It was growing. And what's interesting is campus network obviously did not work, right? We are not talking about, you know, Adam and Wayne who started it, talking about Mark Tekerberg. And what's interesting though is that campus network actually have dramatically more features. And a lot of features which much later Facebook would have and lead to a lot of success. The activity fee groups events, a lot of these things, they had years before Facebook, years. And what's interesting is if you go back and you talk to the people who are involved in this, I got interviewed the folks from campus network and all stuff. And one of the things they point out is that one of the reasons Facebook won was that it was like incredibly simple. And so people at the time were using screen names and pseudonyms online. So like the amount of novelty they were willing to have was like just having their real name and photo and directory, which it would Facebook started as, right? That was enough. The idea that you're also going to have all this other stuff out about you was like not, no. Like that was not something people were comfortable with. And you saw this where Facebook very slowly over time added more and more public features than major more public as we as consumers became more comfortable with it. And I think it's a really great example when it comes to technology businesses. But it's so easy as a technology business to build the best features from a technical perspective or from a sort of meta, I don't know, like a first principles perspective. But like your job is not to just create something that has the most bells and whistles, but it's actually something that customers want to use. And so I think that's really important. And this is why with a blue ocean, I think the thing that's important is usually to start with either a wedge or a metaphor, right? Start with a much smaller feature set that people are ready for. And over time expand or start with sort of like a metaphor or where you're doing something that may be in a new space. But it's a familiar process and is letting you eventually grow into that blue ocean. But you can't just go and build the blue ocean knowing a lot. So this is something that I think is a great lesson for entrepreneurs. And I feel that I feel that a technical entrepreneur does not take this into consideration until much later on, which is, I'm not sure if you have an insight as to why so many businesses fail. But this seems like it could be a very blatant reason as to why so many businesses fail. Oh, 100%. I mean, there's all this interesting research around how successful serial entrepreneurs do something very different than person entrepreneurs. So successful serial entrepreneurs do something. They do solution seeking, not problem finding solutions seeking, not problem finding. So what's the difference? Solution seeking means they start with the problem. They're like, I want to solve cloud security. Then they go into the work to figure out what that means, what that looks like. But they don't actually care from a technical perspective or a feature over what that looks like. They just want to solve the problem because they know that problem is ready to be solved. First, I'm entrepreneurs when the biggest, most common stakes is they do problem finding where they start with a solution that they essentially built for themselves, like this is a great idea. And they look to try and find a market. And to me, this is like, this happens all the time. It's totally crazy because it's literally building for an audience of one. And you see this, people are like, yeah, I'm trying to like find product market fit. But the reality is like, they're literally starting in a reverse. Like when you start with finding product market fit, you should start with the market, not the product, right? You start with the market and then you work on building up the product to get that fit. If you start with the product nine times out of 10, it is a horrendous, horrendous method of getting there. It's very inefficient, very expensive and raw with failure. Now, when did you, let's bring it back to your life and your career and what you've learned? Because this is not something that jumping into your first CMO gig, you would have realized. So how did you, how did you grow yourself? Like how did you come to these conclusions? Where did you go to seek answers as you're growing your business to 55 and then merger? Because that's not easy to do either. So you probably made some mistakes at the beginning that a lot of people may. Oh, I made mistakes all throughout it all the time. Like, you know, and so, you know, one of the things that I always think is sort of interesting is like, you know, I literally don't think of myself anywhere in that journey, even when we were sort of having some of our biggest highs. I never thought myself as successful, which I think can often maybe be sort of psychologically, probably not healthy, right? Because there's a lack of contentment that comes from that. But I think this idea of like always trying to be better is always very useful because for me, I always realize that like other people typically had like the best answers. And so I've always surrounded myself with like a lot of people in sort of a kitchen cabinet. I don't like the word mentor because I feel like it has a lot of like weird sort of overly formal connotations to it. But the idea of like, I had a lot of people, some were formal advisory board members, some were board directors, some were friends, some were older, some were younger, some were the same age, some had very different experiences. But I would probably have on any moment, like 15 people who I was in regular touch with for advice. Because like people have seen these problems before, like this is not actually like you're not the first one to deal with like how to manage someone. And so I found that that having that group of people that I could call upon was like a dramatic game changer for being able to rapidly grow as a CEO. And I had like lots and lots of mistakes and I like messed up a lot of CEO, but I a lot of I would have messed up way more, you know, if I hadn't had all those people supporting me. Now you mentioned something about just being like self aware of really just your own faults and your own shortcomings and sort of supplementing that with like a healthy group of column mentors, column just, you know, peers, what not. How do you, how do you psychological, this is a tough question, but it's something that I think a lot of people struggle with. So I want to ask you, if you don't have answers, fine. How do you psychologically impose on yourself, the will to say that I'm not good enough to, I don't know what I don't know. Is there an exercise that you went through as a massive like screw up that just sort of shook you to your core that made you go outside because I think that that kicking off point where you where you get the first mentor, I'm just going to use a word because I don't know what else to call it, you get that first mentor, that's like the string of your that's the kickoff point for your success in the future, if you can open your mind to that concept, I think I think there's a few things. I mean, one is like I wouldn't actually necessarily agree. I'm not maybe not saying this, but I wouldn't actually necessarily psychologically a great thing. Like, you know what I mean, like there's a level of, I think a level of ambition that tends to come from a place of like pain that's like not particularly great always. So I think the idea of like viewing yourself as like less than as a driver of behavior is like very effective. I don't know if it's like great. You know what I mean, I don't know if I can say on a subjective level that that's like a good thing. It is, but I don't know if it's a good thing. I think in terms of maybe a more healthy way to think about like learning to take feedback or advice. And I think it's maybe a little less clinical, so to speak, I guess would be like, I think when I think reframing your work as a, as the process is your product. Right. So your product is not whatever you're doing, right? If you want to be an entrepreneur, you're going to be creating different products and different, different categories at your entire career. It's always going to change. And so you have to think about your process and how you develop an idea, how you build your business, that process, which is unique to you, because everyone doesn't slightly differently. That is what you actually are working on as an entrepreneur, that process, that is your product. If you're building, if you're making sunscreen or if you're building software, the process is actually really, really fundamental important. So I think when you shift your thinking to thinking about the process as the product, it becomes much easier to completely reinvent that, to change it, to bring it outside opinions, outside voices, to, because you realize like, that's actually your job, right? Your job isn't just make the best sunscreen, your job is, how do I get better at this process? And I think when you're trying to constantly focus on the process, it makes everything I think much easier. I think it lowers our very human defenses around change. I think that the one word you mentioned was the one thing you mentioned was like lowering the human defenses, which I think is, is a healthier way to put it than just, than just thinking that you're not adequate enough as an entrepreneur. So if you understand that process and you know that your job is to understand that process, not only will that open your mind up, but that is, I'm assuming the secret to success in serial entrepreneurs, because they are no longer building the product. They are now focusing on the best, they have optimized and continuously focused on building up the process and then the widget is just a result of that. Totally, it's really what I think one of the things that's important is that one of the things you realize when you start making, you know, when you're CEO and you end up sort of making CEO friends like all stuff is like, people are entrepreneurs and leaders for a lot of different reasons. A lot of them are not particularly like emotion is satisfying reasons. Some of them really are, right? Some of them people really love the coaching aspect and all stuff, but some of them are like pretty dark, but come from a place of pain or like, there's a lot of people who grew up in some form of broken home and are trying to sort of prove something to themselves into society and maybe their parents, right? And so I think it's really, really important to also think about like looking at your motivators and your behaviors and thinking about your motivators and being open to the idea that like maybe it actually isn't like, you think about life as a sort of satisfaction and contentment thing, right? Maybe actually being an entrepreneur is not the thing that's going to best maximize your satisfaction and contentment because if you're sort of trying to solve something that's internally broken, like it's not going to solve it, right? And you're just going to waste a bunch of time. And so I think that's something that I think we don't talk about a lot when it comes entrepreneurship. I think we always sort of assume that it's like this good thing for the person, but I know a lot of entrepreneurs who use it as sort of a distraction from dealing with like other internal personal issues. That makes sense. It does. And I think that that's some of like, you know, the whole hustle porn issue was, it was highly criticized because being an entrepreneur is a lot more psychologically draining than I think a lot of people understand and to, you know, I don't, I only reference Gary V because he just speaks. He's changed his tone and he's a very prolific speaker and he has a huge audience. So when he says something people listen. So I think he's also changed his tone because he used to be very adamant about like, you know, work harder like side hustle this side hustle that. And I think that it's the wrong message for people that just want to be happy and they have to balance and you can be quite successful and quite happy within an organization and you can be exceptionally brilliant and smart and bright and financially well off still working for somebody. Like you mentioned, it may not be for everyone, but it could definitely be for some people. Totally. And what's interesting is one of the things this actually really I think is really fascinating. It was like, I have a lot of friends are entrepreneurs who have told me a various time things like, well, I don't want to like go to therapy because whatever is this broken part of me that drives me. I don't want that to go away. And I actually think that's like a much more common thing that people realize, especially when successful people is that like they're like, I don't want to fix myself because whatever is broken seems to be causing some good sort of like external rewards. And I have two thoughts about one is I think the external rewards are sort of fleeting right we're all going to die eventually right and then two is that. What I've seen is that most of my friends who sort of do the work to become more piece of themselves who maybe started on the side not being a piece of themselves right and that being a big ambition driver at that they don't actually lose the ambition. They're just much more self aware and are better at taking care of themselves and like are better about that stuff and people actually I think are more attractive to the idea of working for those people because I think they actually come across much more confident because they've done the self inventory and the self work and the self assessment and all that kind of stuff which ironically I think makes people I think knowing your weaknesses tends to make people view you as stronger. And so I also tend to also push people on this idea of like brokenness can often lead to a lot of ambition and energy and all this stuff. But you know working on that brokenness isn't going to make you not ambitious. That's it's something that I don't think is discussed enough and I think that it has to be increasingly discussed I appreciate you going there and bringing this up because I had no idea where we're going to go with this chap I really really appreciate that and I think that. As long as we normalize we normalize the mindset of an entrepreneur so that somebody else who's listening or watching or whatever hopefully will hear this and understand that perhaps especially a solo printer where they're not they don't have a sounding. So it's a very important thing to do is to work on the work that you're doing on the board right like you mentioned it's tough. They can they can work on themselves and keep working on your business but know that working on yourself is like always always number one like never never opportunity where it isn't number one is you know like you mentioned like it's we all die we all die so what's what's the point in building something if you're you're going to kill yourself doing it or if you're going to be sad or pressed or. It's very stressful who sort of have an epiphany at 35 or 40 that they have been sort of trying to solve the problem the completely wrong way and you know to a person I know they would all wish they could go back and sort of take a different course and so yeah I think you think you nailed it. Yeah that's it's tough to hear because it's always like grass is greener right it's always like that's all people think and I know like now now with this podcast and I still I do a whole bunch of stuff but I work I work quite a bit and I have my like myself I think about you know how much effort and how much energy I'm spending and am I giving enough time to my family and all this all these things that I you know I'm trying to self-aware optimizing and making sure that I don't. Have my professional hobbies take away from things that really matter right which the people that are most important and if somebody's worth a nine to five and you know they come in at nine o'clock and they clock out at five o'clock and they don't get an email after five o'clock and. They're looking at somebody who perhaps has like you know two extra three X the the the wealth it seems like but it doesn't it doesn't really translate like that like happiness has it has an intrinsic value that a lot of people don't realize it has until they've lost it and I think that's something that people really have to take note of and I actually speak on I speak about this on a much smaller scale just in terms of like switching jobs for like five K or 10 K. And and how you better make sure that that switches worth it and that company in the culture and the leadership is all in line with like your ideology because if it isn't you're not going to enjoy that 10 K you're going to wish you never had that 10 K so entrepreneurs like a whole other level right so very good I want to I want to just you know we kind of went off on on a really good chat but I want to I want to sort of tee it up with just a few like questions that I like to ask at the end. And and one of them being I'm just trying to think of which ones I want to ask because there's a lot of good stuff that we aren't going to have time to do today and maybe sometime in the future but one of the ones I like to ask is just one life lesson that you've learned over your career that you would impart on somebody within a company or entrepreneur. I am I'm I started sort of working professionally when I was 18 I sort of started doing college or quasi part time and so I'm 29 now I've been working for 11 years which is a long time for 29 year old and I've been like amazed at the amount of people who I've met in the first four years of my job and working. And that I have now become in various sort of funny come the universes of weird thing sort of way huge parts of my life often people who I met and maybe like like thought of this is just a fleeting meeting like literally may change the course of my life and I think that long that seeing that happen I feel we've had that happened when I was very young because I think going forward I'm going to do that. I'm very old idea that like any meet might like dramatically change your life but it also sort of speaks to the importance of I think like living with integrity and being honest and forthright and all these things because like look like people like you're not going to they're not going to disappear we live in a hyper connected digital world and so I think I think the idea of just like the light world life is very long term and you should sort of I think approach it with that mindset and that perspective. I think that's something that the sooner you learn that the better for sure that's a very important that's a very important life lesson and I don't think that's discussed enough either people make knee jerk reactions at very young ages and I think that that can really impact you later on in life especially like you mentioned where you're just. Yeah you're jerked to someone because you're having a bad and you know that's going to come back to haunt you because it's like I see on the having hired a lot of people just the amount of back channel references people do and hiring and like the people they call you never would expect or the people they call and so like yeah. Life is very interconnected very good very good insight and one more question just a resource a book a podcast it can't be your book but another book that you would recommend to or actually well two things first of what book are you working on now but I also want to get a resource that you would learn from or suggest other people check out. I'm like literally three weeks in the research for it so it's too early to talk about it and all come out of like 2022 but in terms of books. I mean one of my favorite entrepreneurship books is the hard thing about hard things have been hard with which is just I think the least romanticized of all the books on entrepreneurship. I read a lot of them but I think it's the most practical like it has a chapter literally about like if you hired someone who is a friend of yours and now you have to fire them what do you do and like that's like the stuff that happens when you're running a company that like people there isn't like a lot of books that sort of talk about that kind of stuff. So that is by far my like number one suggestion people are either first time CEOs or first time entrepreneurs to read that book very good and what's next last question what's next for you you know I wanted to I wanted to dig in a little bit more into this but we we went through a whole bunch of great stuff so exit the company wrote a book you're writing another book what do you want to do you're you're 29. I do a lot of startup investing should find a lot of fun and enjoyment out of and so sorry for now you know be a full time writer I do a lot of speaking obviously because of COVID that speaking is not a thing right now so I sort of told myself that COVID is a writing sabbatical which sort of helped mental training up at all. So once once that ends I think you know get back into speaking about the topic of my new book make keep investing in like really great entrepreneurs. Very good I appreciate it and where do people go to to find you. It's just Alan a L L E N dot XYZ and there's links to book stuff and all sorts of good stuff newsletter social media all the good stuff. That's all for today thanks again for joining me on another episode of the success story podcast. You can download or stream this podcast wherever podcasts are available including iTunes Spotify Google stitcher I heart radio and many others. 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