from the crossroads of America in the hooer state of Indiana this is get in the podcast focused on the unfolding stories and extraordinary Innovations happening right now in the Heartland I'm Matt hunkler CEO at powderkeg and I'll be one of your hosts for today's conversation I'm joined in Studio by co-host Christopher to day let's roll CEO at Elevate Ventures and Nate spangle head of community at powderkeg come on and on the show today is Jim Goldman co-founder and CEO at Trava security turned around I pointed the dry racer Mark at Scott and I said Scott I want to run this company for you that's awesome
Jim Gman is a co-founder and CEO of Travis security and it is a company that helps protect small and medium-sized businesses from the potential damage of cyber threats they are a powder K top 100 tech company in cyber security and recently accepted this award on stage at rally the largest cross sector Innovation conference in the world and before co-founding Trava Jim has done some really interesting things he worked as a professor at Purdue for 20 years he also worked at exact target Salesforce and the FBI So today we're going to talk about cyber security and what even non-technical people need to know about the space
growing a business and raising Capital even in a Terri economic environment staying grounded while scaling a fast growing startup and so much more Jim thanks for being here and welcome to the show oh it is my pleasure we are really excited for this because Trava has been doing some amazing things and it's been fun to capture little snapshots in the journey but I think this snapshot in particular is going to be really exciting just on the heels of winning your top 100 tech company award and having a really successful Presence at rally thanks we were shocked by the award obviously very pleased as well we
we were excited uh to to hear about it and excited to hear too about some of your success at rally can you tell us a little bit about that yeah first time at rally it was the first time so you never know what to expect right the inaugural year yeah inaugural year and and so we went in not knowing what to expect but my goodness we had many great conversations and we've got some good leads and may lead to some opportunities so really couldn't be happier us too even amongst all the things that we were doing with the awards and interviews we had some tremendous
conversations we'll have to save some of that for a future episode but today we're here to talk about your journey Jim and I have so many questions because I know a lot about what you've been doing here at at Trava obviously with the partnership that we have but diving in a little bit more into your background being at Purdue for 20 years and before that you were in Industry as well can you tell us a little bit about how you ended up getting into higher education from traditional business world you bet so I describe my career as a zigzag and I'm a big proponent of
zigzag careers when I talk to younger people as opposed to straight up one corporate ladder type of thing I've done a wide variety of different things if you go back even further than what I was sharing earlier my first job out of undergraduate was I was a middle school math and science teacher that's awesome so that was my first job what was the one lesson you learned from teaching Middle School Math and Science the sad part is it pays so poorly if I could have supported my family I'd probably still be doing it today but cyber security industries grateful that uh you're not still doing
that yeah I I think that around Middle School is when all the kids start to freak out about math right because you had that little thing called geometry yes the theorems is that what theorems happen yeah got I get to know Pythagoras really well yeah algebra geometry trigonometry yeah exactly fun stuff so then what brought you into in industry in the private sector from being a school teacher what's interesting is the computers were just starting to come into the schools and so I went back and I got an MBA in management information systems and so that's then what gave me the bridge into being a
director of management information systems in Industry which is where I started do you feel like that timing was really important because I think about that today uh I'm so grateful that I got introduced to computers as the internet was taking off I was the first year in college that people outside Harvard could have Facebook it was right on the cusp and I think about people graduating today and all the AI tools that are out there there's these like pivotal moments I couldn't agree more timing is everything it's these little Windows of opportunity open up in the universe and you have to recognize them and be
able to step into them yeah yeah tell me a little bit about how you navigated that the whole opportunity at Purdue is a good example when I was in Industry again this is a history lesson this was before the internet before tcpip the really hot computer at the time was the digital Equipment Corporation vaxes and microvax and many companies could now afford computers that couldn't have previously before it was if you couldn't afford a Mainframe from IBM you didn't buy a computer Y and what happened was I just happened to work for a couple of companies that had Regional Offices across the company country each
with these microaces Etc and so we had to figure out a way to get them to talk to each other today people would say what's the big deal back then AT&T still had a monopoly you couldn't hook a modem to the network and so it was a challenge to figure out how to get computers to talk to each other over long distances I happened to do it and then Purdue how did you do that well it was these without getting too technical well we'll get a little geeky it was these things called multiphase multiplexers so you would basically basically chop up one digital line into
multiple pieces and send little pieces of messages you know that was over Copper at the time yeah exactly exactly yeah exactly so then what happened was Purdue said maybe there's something to this and so they came up with this course that they called Data Communications at the time and so they were looking for a faculty member to teach this one course in data Communications and literally was almost on a but what the heck else you send off a resume that's so cool and long story short I got the faculty position and that one course turned into an entire degree program in network engineering which we
started very early on I I'm a paranoid individual by Nature so I started saying there's some security implications here everybody thought I was ridiculous network security led to cyber forensics started the Cyber forensics program there and and yeah the rest is history that's how the FBI I thing came into oh we got to go that sounds interesting math teacher MBA to Purdue faculty yes to Industry to Purdue faculty in in in Industry who are you with in Industry so I was with a couple companies in in New England uh one was called ventrex Laboratories early biotech very early biotech and then I was just with
a regional class company called Portland Glass that's really cool yeah in those two decades working with all of those students how did you encourage them to stay on top of the latest Technologies and uh I I would imagine in any program I saw this even at the business school down at at Kelly School of Business kind of by the time you're teaching it in the classroom especially as a marketing major the social networks are there are new social networks now and the curriculum is based on what was 3 to 5 years ago I would imagine it pretty similar in technology and it was probably more
about learning how to learn well absolutely and that's what I most tried to instill in my students is the need for lifelong learning but believe it or not what we used there were no good textbooks I ended up writing eight college level textbooks in network engineering and but again irony of how do you keep up or the lifelong learning thing is we literally used cataloges like data Communications equipment cataloges and I would teach the students okay here's what this device does here's how it works and then gradually started building Laboratories that had that equipment in it wow that's pretty impressive yeah so you eight textbooks
so did you distribute those individually or did you go through one of the Publishers no SP technically I only wrote seven because one got translated into Chinese so I didn't write that one but it's pretty cool to see your name it's all in Chinese and it says James Gold that's great that's awesome so while you were 20 years at Purdue you're you're a highered professor was entrepreneurship something you were thinking about or were you just all in on what's going on with network information cyber security at the time oh I definitely was and Purdue at the time was not nearly as positive about faculty being
involved in entrepreneurship as they are now what really struck me I don't know you guys have been around Indiana long enough do you remember when we first started talking about the Indiana brain drain oh yeah that all these students were getting these great educations but there was no opportunities and Tech for them here and what really struck me was even for the students that were still in school like the Juniors and seniors they had tremendous skills already but there was no part-time work for them in their chosen field they were working at your average fast food restaurant so I thought okay some it's my old
expression somebody ought to do something okay I'm somebody so I started a consulting company when I was a faculty member and I would employ my students is 1099s and we do Consulting work that's great I love that and what year was this so that would have been probably 2005 to 2011 2011 was my last year there so you're started your career out in New England besides like puring this open role like what brought you into Indiana like what what was like oh i' I've heard some good things some bad things what have you uh what were your thoughts coming to from New England to Indiana
so that's actually a funny story so I I applied to Purdue right it was like around Thanksgiving didn't hear a thing not even a thank you for your resume anything right so I'd totally forgotten about it the next February I get a call and they said we had 200 applications you're one of eight finalists and we'd like you to fly out next week and so i' forgotten about like where I even sent the application into whatever I said so tell me again you're in South Bend that's great F luckily they still invited me to come in interview where am I going south put me on
the plane yeah you had talked I think I had done some some research that you had early exposure to entrepreneurship through your grandpa and tell us a little bit about like the family entrepreneurship genan sure sure happy to my grandfather immigrated from the Russian Empire now it's part of Ukraine actually and he arrived in I want to say 1907 he came over by himself he was 16 years old and in those days you've all heard the Immigrant story there's no work for them so they did what they could and so he he became a junk dealer so he was a independent junk dealer outside of
Boston and at first he had a horse then he had a truck and he would go into Boston and tear out the old boilers from from The Office Buildings that kind of thing and he'd bring them back to his yard he break them apart he'd put the cast iron over here the brass over here the copper over there and then he'd sell it so he was a a Pioneer metal recycler what are a few of the lessons that you learned about entrepreneurship hard work from your grandpa that that was it really it was hard work it was like you can do this yourself you don't
have to depend on anybody else I think it's just so amazing to get to witness that first and I was fortunate to have a a grand Grandpa who's also an entrepreneur and then another Grandpa who's a farmer which is kind of entrepreneurial too 100% talk about independent businessman and it's just like a paradigm shift and something I took for granted growing up was that oh this is a totally legitimate career path and a lot of people don't necessarily get that message is a big part of why we do this here with get in telling these stories so people can hear and see that's totally possible
even if you're a professor at the time do you have advice for people that might be in higher ed maybe they're a professor at any of the esteemed universities around the country that are wanting to keep the door open in the private sector but they're enjoying teaching but hey after I do this I want to join the private sector what would you say to those professors I I I think you it's not like a either or right you can't wait and say I'm going to do that later you have to almost build those muscles over time so you have to take that chance step out
start some kind of entrepreneur activity even if it's small while you're in there and then that way it's just a shift in the percentage or a shift in the balance right eventually you teach less and you do more in the entrepreneurship thing actually the FBI thing came along while I was at Purdue but that worked out well because at the time at Purdue in my last few years I was only teaching graduate courses a couple nights a week so I could spend most of my days working for the FBI can you is that unclassified now can you talk about what you did with the FBI
I can talk in general terms yes yeah the kind of the joke I like to say is I was everyone's worst nightmare a cyber nerd with a gun okay so like you they while you're a professor at Purdue the FBI calls you up and you're like uh oh what have I done yeah so we got some I started the Cyber forensic program as I said and then we got some funding to start to figure out how to reverse engineer malware so malware was a new thing MH and what occurred to me okay it's just software we ought to be able to reverse engineer this it
figure out what it's doing so got some funding had a couple of grad students we started trying to figure out how to reverse engineering be this was like in 2000 the FBI was trying to build their capability in that area around the same time I was actually working for the Indiana State Police already at that point and then through that the FBI heard about the work work I was doing came to see me um in a positive way in a positive way just wanted to clar black black SUVs roll up and then they said could you get a top secret clearance so I said sure
So that's another whole story we probably don't have time for but got the top seceret clearance went to work for the FBI as a task force officer were you still a professor so you're doing both of these right you're a top secret FBI agent and a Purdue task force not an agent that's still pretty cool clarification can you just for the listeners that might not be as as hip to cyber security 2000s what does malware look like give me the 10,000 foot flyover yeah what were you solving there in a lot of cases back then it was malicious code embedded in Adobe files Adobe PDF
files so people would just innocently open up a PDF they used to be able to embed code in the PDF so when you opened it that code would execute you know put some malware on you this was like the Heyday of piracy too like Napster had taken off there were all kinds of torrent downloads of pirated PDF right textbooks things like that and there was just so much naive yeah in general in the general public for instance we worked on a case where someone had launched what's called a watering hole attack so what that means is you're innocent you're not doing anything wrong this was
a person that was a bank employee that went on to like their local TV station to check the weather unbeknownst to them that local TV station's website had been infected yep all right they got the infection Bank ends up being exploited oh do you have any other stories of those like I don't know like stories around people that accidentally expose your company cuz I think when people think through cyber security they're like okay just don't click on the links and the suspicious emails reported as fishing there's a few trainings that you sign up for but I'd be curious to hear of like other creative ways
you're seeing cyber attacks happen can I tell you my favorite yes is when our team gets emails or texts from me that say Hey Kevin can you please transfer $1,000 as fast as you can I need help I'm on the road and I need $1,000 for blah but in gift cards right like I need I need I'm not kidding you every once in a while and this happened to last company too oh no um people start freaking out and they're trying to get get a hold of somebody else in the company like toast stranded on the road and he needs money what I need to
figure out how to get this money to him and people like no no no no he would never ask for that it's crazy so you're absolutely right and the same thing happens with us whenever we get a new employee I think it's because LinkedIn got hacked several years ago so everybody's LinkedIn information phone numbers is available so as soon as anybody posts that they started a new job at Trava they get a text supposedly from me saying a similar thing yeah so what we did was we added a slide to Our onboarding Deck right and just warning Etc what's happened this last time we onboarded
an employe is we didn't even get to onboarding and he he already gotten a text amazing the boldness of of these people trying to get a cyber security company with a Cyber attack right there's a thousand other companies you could choose yeah I've even noticed um docu sign something's gotten into docu sign recently I'll get these all the time it feels like it's almost daily same thing what are the top three things right now that people can do to protect themselves from cyber security attacks whether they're a CEO hire Trava that's number one that's number one we'll call that onea the the simplest thing that
I've heard is count to three in other words we're we're all so we're all so busy right we got too much in our inbox and we and they're getting better and better you know at what they're sending us and so it's if you click on something you open it it's don't do anything it's almost take your hands away from the keyboard M mhm and count to three and say before you click the link before you do anything it so used to click and go yeah yeah we do a lot of testing internally and I will confess on the air I got caught all right now
the way I got caught is I've got backtack meetings all day long and I got some kind of email from a calendar that said I was missing a meeting something like that and I'm like yep I won't tell you what I said but like yeah how can this happen right it's a click oh and then how did you know what are The Telltale sign well because it was a test and the came oh it was a test it was a test gotta good thing it was just a test not I failed the test not a real yeah it's human nature right and that's exactly what
cyber security attacks are and that's that's why you have to change your human nature especially in the business where and it's fixing right now count to three yeah are there any other quick hit ones like that that everyone should know have a good system in place whether it's software or just internal process so that you're able to forward anything suspicious better to forward something that is legitimate that you think is suspicious than the other way around yep that's great advice I I'd love to dive into right so you were at Purdue for 20 years you're helping out with the FBI and the state police what
brought you back into the private sector after as you transition out of pred can I ask one question before we go to the next phase yeah I want to go back to the university real quick I'm I'm curious what thoughts you have around Tech transfer University Innovation like if you were the president of a university what radical changes would you make to unleash and give a better opportunity for Tech trans for and commercializing things to attract the best entrepreneurs that have the best shot at taking whatever that thing is and commercializing it the risk of offending an infinite number of University people don't put phds
in charge of Entrepreneurship oh and why is it because phds went to school to study who knows what they're lifelong Learners there are people teaching entrepreneur ship and Tech transfer that have never started a business how important was your previous professional experience to your success as a professor I think it was critical actually but what you have to remember is I don't have a PhD I have two master's degrees and I taught at one of the finest universities in the country if not the world great opportunity I don't know that they'd hire me today yeah that's interesting I like that advice get more people from
industry into positions ofis it's interesting we talked about this with an episode with Dan Hanahan of siger who was an entrepreneurship major just like you right and it's how much of Entrepreneurship is learning in the books right versus how much is just like going out and doing it same with the professors right it's like you get someone who's done this before and it's like Ah that's not how it is in the real in the textbook it's like that but in the real world do quite work like that with Matt's NDA 100% yeah exactly what I'm saying I think that's right yeah one of my favorite
professors at IU was Jerry Hayes who taught the Venture Capital class and had gone out and raised Venture Capital during the doc boom and then went on he lived it yeah he lived it and like literally he built a now a qualified credit investor course because he actually knows how to do it he's done deals on both sides of the table I think this is a a subtle plug isn't Elevate and Gary don't they just didn't they just drop the Venture Bible That's you can get it for free from elevate website I just saw Landon post about that and I actually downloaded it yeah we're
really excited about what he's doing we got to get him on and the SEC is entertaining rules right now that that uh to change the accredited investor rules where if you get a I'm missing the words but basically Jerry's developed a curriculum right that you can read study and take a test and that could end up qualifying you as an accredited investor which is really exciting could be gamechanging another great example of someone from industry making an impact in in higher education which is awesome talk to us a little bit about going from higher ed back into uh the private sector because I imagine that's
a hard change to make after 20 year two decades yes and no because remember I had my consulting company the whole time right and it was almost like I knew the time was right to be done with higher ed now this is a interesting story exact target was really starting to hit the steep part of its curve in 2011 and they had a posting for their first vice president of information security because much like many of the companies Trava deals with now they were trying to sell to the International Space Enterprise space getting push back on the lack of maturity of their security and compliance
program so the irony is I go to interview for the job and who am I interviewing with but a former student oh wow that's wild that's awesome no way tables of turn did did you feel good about that or were you nervous about that did you get that student I felt good actually ironic go back and check the book you know I'll drop the name Tim horo he's awesome I love that so he was a student of mine and I've probably had thousands of students but you remember a handful and Tim was one I remembered right sure and so anyway it was a great great
conversation great interview got the job and he was my boss so I was speak to the power of professional networks yeah I was his Professor he was my boss never burn a bridge exactly life is goes in circles right exactly y tell me a little bit about that Journey exact target to Salesforce you're learning now you're full-time in industry it's no longer Moonlighting you're drinking from the fire hose at a fast growing in one of the hottest companies and one of the hottest companies in the midwest you all know the exact target story it was the best years of my life in terms of jobs
you just couldn't beat the culture and what was going on there and so we had a lot of success we worked very quickly to get them iso27001 Certified International certification made a big deal because we we had all the biggest banks as our customers you name it and and so security was really a big deal and then in summer of 2013 we were acquired by Salesforce excuse me became the Salesforce marketing Cloud so I became ceso of the Salesforce marketing cloud and they kept adding company so that went from three companies to six companies that kind of thing and I just built out the the
consistent security and compliance processes across the marketing Cloud then the thing that most people don't realize about Salesforce is it's just 50 or 55 Acquisitions jammed together Each of which came with their own security and compliance program or more often lack thereof and in 2016 they asked me to do what I'd done for the marketing Cloud for all of Salesforce globally so I became the first vice president of security governance risk management compliance for all of Salesforce I did that till December 2019 are you ready to transform your brand with award-winning video content that captures your vision and connects with your audience check out Alchemy
the experts at building your brand using video from story-driven social media Snippets that leave a lasting impression to compelling fulllength documentaries they have got the expertise to take your brand to the next level Alchemy is actually our video partner here on get in they do amazing work all the videos across social across YouTube all that is done by Alchemy and they're an amazing partner to work with reach out to me Nate at powderkeg or check out Alchemy film.com to get connected with Alden and his team they will take care of all your video needs then the Travis story is a great story if you want
to go to that but ask another question yeah please tell us about that because I I know you're unemployed at the time correct I went back to start my own Consulting thing again yeah yeah doing my entrepreneurship Consulting thing and out of the blue in February of 2020 now the world's about to shut down because of coid right Scott dorsy gives me a call and most people but for the benefit of those that don't know high alpha does these things called Sprint weeks where they conceptualize a company in the course of a week and so they had a Sprint week and in this case they'
invited or this person invited themselves mat Bressler from tdf ventures in in Maryland had been doing research in this intersection of cyber risk management and cyber insurance so he brought his research in and he and Scott teamed up as the leaders of this particular Sprint week so they put together a concept had their pitch deck and so Scott gives me a call and says hey you have an hour on Thursday I'd like to this guy Matt brn I would like to run this idea by you see what you think sure so I came down they were still in the old Circle tower building and it
literally was the last meeting I had before the world shut down and so we met and they start pitching it and being the former college professor there was a white board in the conference room I get up I started drawing data flow diagrams and ven diagrams had the dry erase marker in my hand I'll never forget it I turned around I pointed the dry eras Mark at Scott and I said Scott I want to run this company for you that's awesome yeah and afterwards Scott and I were talking about that and he and he told me quite frankly Jim I didn't see that coming yes
what was it about the opportunity that made you so sure to turn around point that whiteboard marker and because it's really where my passion was it's what it's exactly really what I had been doing at Salesforce but I had 100 employees about 150 contractors and so forth and so on $30 million budget it's okay how do we take all that knowledge and process and package it for the sub Enterprise and bid Market yeah because you saw the growth that created at exact target when you got all those certifications you could sell internationally you could sell to Banks why limit that only to the companies that
get to the scale cyber risk has been increasing sure day and every day and it's just as likely if not more likely to victimize the sub prise in the midm market so here's a tremendous opportunity because the other part of it is if you look at nearly every other cyber security company out there they all dream someday of selling to the Enterprise right that's what they want to do they want to sell to Microsoft or Google or Salesforce and so from the start we said no we're not interested in selling to the Enterprise that's not what we're trying to do what talk about Trava do
a little deeper on Trava so what actually does Trava do so if I'm a is your target market a million dollar 10 50 million SAS companies only all types of companies like so the the interesting thing and this is a lesson for the entrepreneurship thing is we knew we had to take a multiphased approach to where we wanted to be so it it breaks that Assumption of you come up with your first product and that's ultimately where you're going to be first product to First Market done that's not what we said what we said was from the very beginning we wanted to be the standard
for cyber risk insight for the insurance industry in order to do that we knew we needed to control the data yep because the way the Cyber Insurance sounds like a good example right there of narrow and deep exactly and and because the way the Cyber insurance industry had been assessing cyber risk because they were using third- party tools didn't control the data couldn't do any correlation analysis machine learning Etc so we said okay we have to control the data how do we do that we have to build our own risk and vulnerability management platform guess what I'd been doing yeah for the last 10 or
15 years okay but then we needed a person that really knew how to build software so you got one old guy right with you know 30 years of cyber risk experience so that luckily we found another old guy in Rob beer who had 30 years of software engineering so we built this risk and vulnerability management platform which you're right at first we brought to SAS companies to direct get quick feedback is it right is it effective early adopters right Gathering the data starting to do the machine learning and the correlation analysis now we're ready to bring something to the insurance industry and say hey we
can give you better cyber risk Insight cut your losses cut your claims Etc so now just in the last six months or so we've made that pivot from only selling direct to mostly SAS companies to bring in our platform to the insurance industry that's interesting I love that tell us a little bit about what that's as an entrepreneur going from your original target market to now broadening that scope with a bunch of partners that could help you resell larger contract sizes you're really like moving up Market the other thing that I'll go back to and it's something we talked about is the lifelong learning is
we knew uh we needed to be involved in the insurance industry so both Rob and I got our Insurance licenses in the state of Indiana not not easy to do yeah property and casually insurance so we to like license insurance agents so we can talk the talk granted we don't have 30 years of experience in it but we are legitimate we we're all covered here Jim thanks are you but you have three friends did you could introduce me to are you um are you influencing how policies are underwritten now are you seeing any impact that that your technolog is having with the with your customers
and they're actually changing their yeah actually we got a a really good example so we some an insurance agency that was using our platform put in an application to a carrier came back with their own scan that I was talking about and said you got this problem this vulnerability came up and it's going to be $112,000 a year for your policy and so that agency sent us what the carrier had provided we ran our own we told the agency to run our scans on our platform and then we looked at the two and we said oh that IP address doesn't even belong to this customer
and we said hey send this back to the carrier wow so went back to the carrier said you're right and the premium went from 12,000 to 9,000 oh holy cow that is massive yeah so that's just one example you talking billions that's sitting out there like that potentially yeah yeah but the other part that it does is it assures that the carriers are writing better policies with lower risk right lower claims lower losses but and this is a massive problem that you went to bat trying to build during a global pandemic your your first scale up company from the ground up as a CEO and
co-founder what were some of the biggest lessons you learn through that trying time of like really growing a company got to a million AR quickly got to a series a round of funding quickly now partnering with insurance companies all within really three years three years the the first thing that's it's really again a lifelong lesson is when you find an opportunity or a problem to solve if it was easy somebody would have already solved it right yeah very true and that's where we started now if you look at it you you've got the Cyber risk industry on one side which changes daily it's brand new
and it's only been around since I was at Purdue right brand new industry on the other side you got the insurance industry which has been around for 200 years and really hasn't changed much in 200 years and so visually we had this idea of these two industries with this huge chasm in between them and we wanted to be the bridge the data Bridge bridge if you will so if you look at it sounds like some good quick Jim I'm on the road I need 000 gift cards you want two that was just interruped my whole punchline if you look at the travel logo it is
the it is a bridge with a strong truss under it that Bridges the gap between the Cyber risk industry and the Cyber insurance industry yeah and I I wanted to just talk about some of the momentum as we get close to time here I know we just you were just a top tech company in cyber security top tech company voted by pwri EG on stage at rally accepting your award what are a couple of the other big wins that you've seen in those last three years know Matt mentioned series a million ARR yeah you know the statistics right only 4% of startups ever reach a
million in that's exactly right it's insane the numbers are insane and it's similar it's 60% of companies that get a successful seed round don't ever aren't ever able to close a series a round and that's not even taken into account the current Tech investment environment that we're in right now looking at historical data before pandemic I'm incredibly grateful for what happened there and thanks to elevate by the way for pleasure your continued confidence we love investing in great companies and great Founders and great ideas but really I think it comes down to our people and our team and I and a lot of that has
to do with our culture again I say it's somewhat tongue and- cheek about Rob and I being old guys but the benefit of being an old guy is you've worked for a few good companies and a lot of really bad companies yeah you've had a chance to make more mistakes than other people that's and so when Rob and I got together it was like what kind of never mind the product what kind of company do we want to have yeah I love that how do you and I love going to work what do we need to do so that we love going to work every
day that's the right question yeah yeah we are at the favorite part of the show at least for Nate this is this is the lightning round there are no wrong answers to this gym there's just three questions are you cool to dive in I'll try all right this is fastpaced nothing to do with the FBI though no we're going to sneak one in there yeah exactly what's your password yes free associ what was the what street did you grow up on what was your mother's M name Jim outside of the amazing entrepreneurial ecosystem what is Indiana known for you know what occurs to me and
it's still Tech and Innovation I am so excited about a tech and a business and AGR noas with Mitch Frasier in I know Mitch with Mitch Frasier in charge of that we I was on a panel at the Indiana Agra Business Council conference a week or so ago man I think Indiana has the opportunity to become the global leader in a tech a business it's like why shouldn't we I love that agree that shout out to that show really great episode with Mitch yep we'll link it up in the show notes what is one Hidden Gem in Indiana I've talked about this before I call
it the one degree of separation what I mean by that is if you don't know someone in the Tech Community or the business Community guaranteed you know someone who does and it's that one degree of separation and just this collaboration even so-called competitors it's like they're going to do every still they're going to do everything they can to help each other that's a great example of a hidden mhm final question who is someone that we need to keep on our radar someone who is doing big things I hate to repeat my answer but I would go back to Mitch Frasier and agran nois he is
he is that guy yeah y love what Mitch is doing over there and hum subtle plug for the episode Jim thank you so much for this conversation it was amazing I love hearing about all the momentum that Trava is building and for our listeners we are still running our t-shirt campaign so anyone out there that listens to it if you want to send three large t-shirts to 16 Tech addressed to Patrick egg Nate we will wear them on the show give you a 60c shout out we want to see what kind of listeners we have out there and and support your startups I love it
great job J was awesome J thanks for all you're doing entirely my pleasure thank you so much this has been get in a powder kick production in partnership with Elevate Ventures and we want to hear from you if you have suggestions for a guest or segment reach out to Matt or Nate on LinkedIn or on email to discuss discover top tier tech companies outside of Silicon Valley in hubs like Indiana check out our newsletter at powder.com newsletter and to apply for membership to the powdercake executive Community Check out powder.com premium we'll catch you next time and next week as we continue to help the world
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