Larry Robinson - CTO at Clear Capital

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Larry Robinson, the CTO at Clear Capital, and we discussed the lessons learned from being a lifelong entrepreneur, the innovation that they're bringing to the real estate valuation process, and the concept of run, grow, transform. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:23) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. It's Larry.

(Larry Robinson at 00:00:35) Joel, how are you? Look at that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) Esther, my friend. It's crazy. It's crazy.

(Larry Robinson at 00:00:41) I don't have the beard, but I have crazy long hair right now. I know. And I'm running around my house trying to avoid my wife and my two oldest girls who are desperately wanting to cut it. So I've built a fort in the upper corner of my home where I can see them coming and fend them off.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:02) I love it. I got a text from one of my friends the other day, and he said emergency extraction services, $1,000, will come to your house dressed as COVID rescue team and take you from your wife for a 14-day fishing trip. I love it. Yeah. Like, that's $1,200 well spent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:23) Get me out of here.

(Larry Robinson at 00:01:25) Yeah, exactly. So no, these are really challenging times. Out of curiosity, you know, I was trying to figure out how many of your podcasts you've done since we've been in this shelter-in-place posture. And from what I can figure, it's at least from podcast 162 forward. Is that kind of right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:47) They don't all air in order.

(Larry Robinson at 00:01:49) Oh, okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:51) Yeah. Which is confusing. It's like when I do my talks in public, people come up to me, and the most frequent question I get is how old are your kids? Because on some of them I'm like, oh, I've got a 3-year-old and a 1.5-year-old. And some of the times it's like they're out of order. So people don't know how old the kids actually are, and I'm like, I love it. I love that people get to listen and they get to feel a part of it. And it's like, it's a lot of fun for me. Yeah. But a couple of them were really interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:14) I know that Ken, the CTO of Ford, that episode aired. And then we did a couple with some people that I've got some close personal relationships with, like Brad Sosa and Mike Matiliam. They're both just personal friends that I've connected with from the show, and I've gone out and visited, and they ended up becoming customers of our leadership product too. So basically, when this was happening, I just started connecting with a few people that I knew really well. I said, hey, can you come on the podcast, like, tomorrow? Because we want to get the best insight for people

(Larry Robinson at 00:02:46) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:47) to help them. So

(Larry Robinson at 00:02:49) Yeah. It's interesting stuff, you know, because one of my, you know, as I was—I just assumed, you know, numeric order was date order. You know, one of my, I guess, burning curiosities was, what, so how many podcasts have you done since shelter-in-place? I'm curious, like, what type of trend you're starting to see? Yeah. Or what's bubbling up as you're talking to more and more people?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:16) So I do between—just I'll give you a little background too. This is fun. It's like behind the scenes. So I do about, I would say, 400 to 500 meetings a year since 2017. Of that, I would say we've done 300-plus podcasts, and of that we've aired 160 or 170. That's because it's like a business and it costs us money, and we have producers and, like, we have to pick the episodes. And so that just creates a natural supply and demand issue, which is how we drive revenue so that we can all do this. Right? So some people pay for their podcast to be produced or scheduled in a certain time. So that's background of the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:01) But for since the COVID stuff, I don't know. Jake, you could chime in. I think we've probably done five or six, but I've also done lots of calls. So I do these things called micro strategy calls, and they're 15-minute calls with other CTOs for me to get a pulse on what's going on, and we also have our email list. And the trend that we've seen is, well, expressed in the episodes that have aired on COVID.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:30) So we like to, you know, edit the content to—like, if I notice a trend across 20 conversations I have with just individual CTOs, not everybody wants to be on the podcast, some people are shy, things like that. I will then ask questions and talk with the guest and bring up those topics so that it brings the most amount of value to the listeners. So some trends being, the CTOs were well-positioned to handle the remote transition. That was probably the biggest one. They're getting a lot of their sales leaders saying, hey, can you come help us be remote? And the larger companies, those that did not have a remote culture in place and had VPN issues and ordering laptop issues, and you can only do things on company property, so we're going to have to order you—they didn't have, like, that startup-y feel. Those companies got impacted the most, and I heard a lot about that through CTOs who had customers who were those people. And those people typically wouldn't have time to come on the show because they were dealing with that fallout.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:32) So but that was a small percentage. I'd say the biggest thing was that the CTOs were helping other parts of the business learn how to go remote. And then, of course, you know, the part nobody wants to talk about is the financial constraint. That's the hardest thing to get people to talk about. Obviously, we're experiencing it because we're a startup, but it's a tough thing to talk about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:57) And when people do talk about it, the people listening can all resonate with it because they're experiencing it, and that's how we connect as people. Right?

(Larry Robinson at 00:06:08) Yeah. Without a doubt. It's, you know, it's funny you talk about, um, you know, does your company have a remote culture or, you know, your sort of business continuity disaster recovery plans, you know, that this has sort of created an unprecedented opportunity to test them. And, you know, a lot of the things that, you know, we were fortunate. We were able to get all 650 of our staff remote in 72 hours, you know, once our CEO and Chief People Officer made the decision. Yeah, you know, let's do this.

(Larry Robinson at 00:06:40) But it's funny you brought up the laptop thing because a lot of people, you know, didn't necessarily have the hardware at their house to be able to do their job. And, you know, like most big companies, you have your supply chains, you know, that you typically buy through. And we didn't know how disrupted those were going to be. And so my Director of IT, you know, said, okay, should—you know, how many laptops should I order? And here's our suppliers. And, you know, my fear was, yeah, you're going through your normal channels. You think you're going to click the mouse, and these laptops are going to show up like they normally do. And so we figured out the configurations that we needed for laptops and monitors, and I dispatched my teams to all the local Best Buys with the idea that possession is nine-tenths of the law. I'm like, just because you ordered it from Dell doesn't mean it's going to show up in a week.

(Larry Robinson at 00:07:32) And we went out and physically laid our hands on the equipment and brought them back to our offices and had them stockpiled. And that turned out to be a very smart move as, you know, there was, you know, runs on laptops and toilet paper and kind of everything else. So

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:52) Yeah. Supply chain's getting disrupted. Big issue. If you have one circuit that comes from a country that you need to complete the laptop, then you are not exporting laptops. Oh. You can't get that piece.

(Larry Robinson at 00:08:06) Without a doubt. And as so much of America has learned, you know, our supply chains are global. And, you know, you get this disruption and, you know, to your point, you might have 90% of what you need for the laptop sitting, waiting to be manufactured in Austin, Texas, but you got that one part, you know, that's stuck in Shanghai or whatnot, and the whole thing cannot come together. So, yeah, we've had a, you know, a bit of luck and a bit of experience and a lot of preparation that, you know, fortunately, allowed us to make the transition fairly seamlessly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:40) I was checking out your LinkedIn page. I was particularly interested in you because I got my start in software in the real estate industry, my professional start

(Larry Robinson at 00:08:50) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:50) in the real estate space. And so I was excited to see what you guys did. But then on your page, I saw—and I don't know if I'm seeing his name right, but his name's Kennan. He did the Space and Time song. Mhmm. That was awesome.

(Larry Robinson at 00:09:05) You know, it's funny. I did a little digging into your background, you know, to, uh, you know, to learn a little bit more about you. And, you know, learning that you first got excited about technology at 10, and then you were in a wheelchair for a year at the age of 12. Is that what you said?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:23) Yeah. The whole process was like almost two years. So I got hit by a car. I was in the wheelchair. And then halfway through, I slipped and fell. And then I re-broke one of my legs, and so that made me go back through the rehab process. So it took like twice as long. Wow. Fun fact that I never told on the podcast, because why don't we do that today, the way I slipped and fell was my sisters thought it'd be funny because I was, you know, hobbling around, to put shampoo on the tile floor. Because we were 12, and that's what you do, and that's what sisters do, I guess.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:03) And they thought I would just slip. You know, a 12-year-old's not contemplating the nature of this long-term pain or whatever. There's like, it would be funny to see Joel slip. So that was how I slipped and fell, which extended it. But yeah, I did. Yeah.

(Larry Robinson at 00:10:18) That's, well, I have a twin sister, so I can tell you sisters are cruel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:23) Um, and I think I

(Larry Robinson at 00:10:24) think she pretty much owned me until I was about 14, and I started to grow. And at one point in time when she approached me for what I'll just call my daily beating, I was big enough to say, okay, we're done with that. But, yeah. I love her. I love her to death. But having a sister will sharpen you for life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:45) Oh, yeah. Siblings, they do great things. Speaking of—I have an older brother who's three years older than me. A great human being, doctor and everything. But when we were kids, we were kids, and, you know, he would bring his friends over and we'd roughhouse or whatever, and it would always be pick on, you know, the little brother. Well, when high school came around, middle school and high school came around, I just had a massive growth spurt, and I became his little big brother. And that's when I stopped getting pushed around so much.

(Larry Robinson at 00:11:14) There you go. It's funny because you're—although we're in very different life stages, it sounds like our journey around technology and learning to code, coincidentally, I learned to code mostly around the age of 12 or 13 also. So, you know, I was finding that to be an interesting parallel. Again, I'm sure we're probably separated by 20 or 25 years, but it was a fun time to pick up the computer and see what you could do with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:45) What was the environment like? Like, how did that come as an option to you?

(Larry Robinson at 00:11:50) Oh, yeah. This is like weird old-timer stories. My very first computer was a TRS-80 from Tandy Corp. And Tandy didn't know what to do with those at the time, so they dropped some off at our junior high, and they gave them to all us math kids. Right? And they said, yeah, we don't really know what these are. We don't really know what you can do with them, but check it out. It's like a calculator with a keyboard.

(Larry Robinson at 00:12:14) And so it was very much a hacker culture. You know, is that we had very—you know, we had no—you know, our first—the manuals that came with that were, you know, Tandy BASIC, Color BASIC. You were learning the very basics of logic, and you had almost no memory to work with. You had no storage. And so since you couldn't do much, we just sort of hacked away.

(Larry Robinson at 00:12:40) And then we got our very first modem, which connected us to the outside world. And before you know it, we're phone phreaking and breaking into things. And the school quickly put a stop to that. But it was very much a journey of exploration, you know. Like, it's almost like someone handing you a hammer and you're going, what can I do with this thing now?

(Larry Robinson at 00:12:59) And, you know, from, you know, hacking turned into writing games. And for me, after writing games, I tried to build my favorite arcade game, Defender, using a TRS-80 computer. And then from there, you know, became very interested even at a very young age, 14, of, like, hey, is there any practical application that you can do with this? And as fate would have it, my parents had ownership in an insurance agency, a Farmer's Insurance agency at the time.

(Larry Robinson at 00:13:37) And, you know, back then, insurance premiums were big thick manuals and calculators, and being good at math, you know, I started looking at these manuals, and I could quickly see that these manuals and all these rates were actually just factorials that I could reverse engineer back down to, like, a base rate and then see all the factorials that led to all these different rates. And I knew, wow, there's no way you could put this entire manual and its contents into a computer program, but you can—you know, especially with limited memory. But a base rate and a factorial, ah, that's a nice compact storage scheme right there. And ended up writing a program that made it very, very easy for insurance agents to ask a potential insured a series of questions, and boom, there was your base rate.

(Larry Robinson at 00:14:28) So something that used to take them an hour, I was able to turn into five minutes, and thought it was pretty cool. And all the agents in the insurance agency started using these computers to calculate rates when they were calling people on the phone. And, uh, and then Farmer's Insurance came along and offered to license it to me. And at the age of 14, found myself a software entrepreneur.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:54) Oh, wow. Yes. You had financial success, like, way early. That is awesome.

(Larry Robinson at 00:14:59) Well, let's just say financial accident way early. I mean, trust me, I didn't do all that saying, uh, and I'm going to be able to sell this for—um, yeah. It's just, you know, like, really the story of almost every company in America or any entrepreneur, it starts with an accident, you know, that thing that happens that you didn't really expect. And from there forward, now it's your game. What do you do with that accident, that accidental collision?

(Larry Robinson at 00:15:32) And that makes for an interesting journey, especially, you know, when I—starting at 14 and I'm 54 now, I'm looking back on four decades of just a crazy journey. So

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:46) Did you notice, like, when you started to hit your early to mid-30s, like, a different mental maturity taking place?

(Larry Robinson at 00:15:56) Yes. Although, I think for me, you know, becoming a CEO at the age of 18, a lot of things happened faster for me. And I think that was a combination of you're forced to kind of grow up quickly. And, you know, having the good fortune, you know, my first company, we ended up automating 82 of the top 500 insurance carriers in the United States. And at a young age, that put me in close proximity to, you know, very senior leadership in an industry that is typically about continuity.

(Larry Robinson at 00:16:32) Right? If you think about insurance companies, you know, they've been around almost since, you know, the beginning of our country. Right? Because they're essential for commerce. Right?

(Larry Robinson at 00:16:40) So they tend to be based in port cities or along rivers and railroad lines, et cetera, et cetera. But they're all about continuity. Right? Insurance companies, 200 years old, 300 years old, 400 years old. And so these CEOs taught me a leadership style of permanence, you know, and how you react in the short term, but you plan for the long term.

(Larry Robinson at 00:17:04) And I mean, think about that wisdom and maturity. You might not get that until late into your thirties or into your forties, and I just had it, you know, driven into me by these CEOs, you know, pre-25. And so that saved me a lot of years of recognizing that. But, you know, to your point, things happen in your life that turn that for you automatically. You know, the birth of your children, no doubt, started to make your life more about theirs and less about yours.

(Larry Robinson at 00:17:38) And, boy, if you take that paradigm right there and then you start to apply it to your company and your leadership, where you start to realize that what you're doing is more about for everyone else than yourself, that's where a very important bit starts to flip, and how you operate and how you think about life starts to get very different.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:05) I completely 100% agree. I didn't realize what having kids would—I mean, you hear it. And I found that this is—have you ever noticed that, like, you can say a sentence or you can understand a concept through hearing it being repeated throughout society, but then as you gain real experience with that phrase or that concept, it just becomes more real? Like, for me in programming, it was like everything's an object, and that just meant different things throughout my programming career.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:37) Well, the same thing is true, I'm finding, for all of these management and leadership topics too. Like, I just am constantly finding them renewed with deeper meaning, and especially as I'm having these kids and I see—having a kid is like it gives you the—obviously, it's incredibly difficult, but it gives you the gift to see, like, an AI human booting up. It's like you don't get to look at the boot process ever, the boot sequence. It's like using a computer and never understanding the boot sequence. Like, you get to watch it, and then you start to extract these timeless truths of how humans operate and behavior and these core underlying things that they're not even conscious, these kids, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:18) Like, on a certain level, they're just reacting to the environment and the environment that you've provided for them. And it's just—it's beautiful and difficult. Like, I think life gets more beautiful and more difficult, and it's like this weird balance, but I'm also enjoying it.

(Larry Robinson at 00:19:42) I love how you say this mini AI machine booting up. You know, I mean, I don't want to spoil the ending for you, but wait until it gets faster and smarter than you. So we can use that analogy for, you know, the future of AI too. But yeah, it's, you know, it's amazing. You also dealt with the death of your mother at 29, you know, which is pretty young.

(Larry Robinson at 00:20:14) But, you know, the birth of your children or the loss of a loved one—you know, I lost two business partners in a one-year span, one to cancer and another to suicide. And that—I mean, boy, you want to talk about, you know, further shaping your view of the world and how you can contribute and what it really means to be human and part of humanity. So both life and loss really, really shapes the way you think about being a leader and what's your purpose.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:47) It—I 100% agree. And it took me a long time to be able to talk about this stuff publicly without choking up because, you know, there's what the world sees when you talk about it and there's what you feel inside when you talk about it. But yeah, that whole process, like, it's very real, like holding your parent's hand as they pass away in front of you with your siblings around you, and you don't understand the gravity of it until you experience it. And I would say that between me, my brother, and my sister, it had the most profound impact probably on me. Because for some reason, it just was this wake-up call that, you know, as much as I was—you know, from the outside, people would say I had done a lot at 29.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:33) But on the inside, I knew I was only operating at 10%, 25%. Like, I was cruising through because I had—you know, I don't know. It just was easy for me. And then I realized, what could I do if I did put it all out there? And it's amazing how much I've surprised myself with how much I could actually output, doing the books and the charity and things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:58) And then I realized, wow, like, I can be happier if I push myself a certain amount. And I also push myself over—I pushed myself to 110%, and I realized that that's not sustainable long term. You start compromising things like your health because you're, you know, not eating right because you're overworking and, like, there's definitely something to be said for pushing yourself to the edge and then backing off a little bit to where you're not, like, completely comfortable, but you're just uncomfortable enough to be proud of yourself. Yeah. That's an interesting thing.

(Larry Robinson at 00:22:33) Yeah. There's an underlying, probably, lesson in all of that too. You know, when you talk about, you know, you're like, alright, you know, there's more than I can be doing. I can be more impactful, and you found a mechanism to do it. But first and foremost, what you probably had to do was face down a bunch of fear about doing it. And once you sort of drive through that fear and say, for whatever reasons, you know, whatever the catalyst was, the age that you were in your life, you know, your children, the loss of your mother, you know, contemplating what to do—something gave you that courage to say, okay, I'm going to do this new thing now. And you broke through that wall, and what you've likely discovered, like so many other people, is it wasn't near as scary as you thought it was going to be.

(Larry Robinson at 00:23:23) And then you come to find out that what holds most of us back, whether it's individuals or companies, is that fear of pushing for that next thing, because it's so easy to get this mentality of, I want to protect what I have. I've got this land. I'm going to defend it. And if I go and take this new land, you know, what happens? And when you're fortunate enough to push through it like you described, it's so enlightening when you get on the other side.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:51) I think about that a lot, especially when it comes to finances. So, you know, we're obviously in this pullback mode of the economy. And I've been asking myself a lot lately, like, I want—you know, I listen to a lot of the speeches. I study a lot of the successful people, and they're always saying, you know, push forward, especially in these downturns. And then but there's got to be more context than that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:17) Right? It's got to be understanding, like, they're obviously giving this advice at times when they have, you know, millions of dollars. Right? And it's like, how much runway do I have? And what's enough runway to make this decision?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:31) Because, yeah, as of today, I think there's, like, 26 million unemployed Americans. Right? This is a lot of great people to hire. But you can't just go out and—you can't—I guess my favorite advice that I've heard from Bezos was, don't make bet-the-company bets. It's like, you know, make strategic decisions, try things, be bold.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:56) You know, when I go and speak at some of these companies, like, very large companies, with executives all over the world, I'll speak at, like, their conferences or their annual meetings where they'll have all the divisional, you know, CTOs, like, 50 CTOs that are running different parts of the world. And the number one topic—do you know what the number one request of a topic I get? What is it? How to be bold, how to take chances. Because these boards and these groups of people, they can't get these executives that are making lots of money to take big risks. And that's what they want me to talk about because they see me, they will read my, you know, book or they'll watch my history, and they see, like, I'll constantly take a risk. And the reason why is because at the end, we die. I mean, at the end of this, we die, and I can make more money by having more experience. But the only way I can get experience is like meaningful growth experience is through taking some risk.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:54) Some people take enough risk to show up on time at their job. Some people take risk to absolutely crush it and take it to the next level and go off and change the world. And we all see risk differently. And it's really interesting. I think—and I love this conversation with you, by the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:14) I'm, like, really engaged with this.

(Larry Robinson at 00:26:16) Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:18) I think this act of this progression or this evolution of myself is something that I find an amazing aspect of existence in humanity. Because it's like this—you can't game it and routine it because then you stop the growth. And if you stop the growth, everything stalls, and then there's no point in existing. So you kind of like have to keep going. Like, life is designed that way. It's really interesting.

(Larry Robinson at 00:26:48) You know, it's funny. You said the number one request is, you know, how can I teach my executives to be bold? You know, Christensen spoke into this in Innovator's Dilemma, you know, at great length on—and again, this is sort of the protect-what-you-have. How do you want to make your executives bold? You have to incentivize them to not maintain the status quo.

(Larry Robinson at 00:27:11) And this gets different for each company. I mean, Bezos is very correct. You know, I can't make bet-the-company type gambles. So if you kind of look at the—it's a bit long in the tooth, but it's still useful—sort of McKinsey's run, grow, transform. You know, a startup like yourself, you need to be making more transformative bets.

(Larry Robinson at 00:27:32) Right? Those the, you know, transforms are these things that, like, if this bet pays off, there'll be big winners and big losers, you know, sort of the classic, you know, Negroponte switch, if you will. And then you've got to do other things, you know, to grow your business and other things just to keep the lights on and run it. And those percentages change, you know, depending on the market you're in and what stage you're in. So a startup, you know, their energy and spend around transformative bets might be 50%.

(Larry Robinson at 00:28:03) But as they mature, you know, those will turn into 30%. And, you know, a company like Bezos, you know, Amazon probably settles in—and I don't know much about it, but I'll just pull it off the top of my head—you know, 8 to 10% of their spend is now transformative, and they're probably spending another, you know, 10 to 15% on grow-your-business initiatives. And at their size, you know, probably, you know, 70 to 75% of their spend is just around running.

(Larry Robinson at 00:28:33) But at these times that you want to change your company, you have to look at that kind of RGT equation and say, okay, are we in an era where we need to now double down and be transformative? And at Clear Capital, you know, this is just pure happenstance, you and I are talking about this. The executive team and our CEO literally had a meeting yesterday where we—and we have a meeting tomorrow where we said, okay, in these times of COVID that are upending our industry, and we're in the real estate valuation industry, what would be the three or four big bets that we're prepared to make? And it was so cool, Joel, to be on an executive team that, instead of hunkering down and saying, oh my gosh, what are we going to do, you know, has the courage to say, come back to the table with the big bets that we should be prepared to make right now that will reposition us on the other side of this, whether we're, you know, whether life returns to normal or we're just on a new trajectory after COVID. What would that look like?

(Larry Robinson at 00:29:41) And that culture in a company is important. Otherwise, we all fade. You know? When I was in college, one of the most impactful—and my degree is in economics, by the way, not technology. One of the most impactful things that a professor said and showed me was a chart of Fortune 500 companies from, like, 1970, and then a chart 15 years later of the Fortune 500 companies.

(Larry Robinson at 00:30:13) And, you know, you think when a Fortune 500 company gets to a certain size, they make their own gravity. Right? They can overcome their mistakes. They can absorb them. And it was really illuminating how many companies had dropped off that Fortune 500 list in just a decade, like 15%.

(Larry Robinson at 00:30:32) And you carry that out over 20 years, 30 years, and what you find is that 50% of those Fortune 500 companies, they're just not here anymore. So size and make-your-own-gravity is no more of a guarantee than anything else. You must constantly ask yourself, what got us here? Will it get us there? And adapting and innovating, not just in technology, but in all parts of your sort of people, process, product—you have to just constantly push.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:09) I 100% agree. And I did have a couple questions. So RGT is acronym for run, growth, transform. Right?

(Larry Robinson at 00:31:16) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:17) And then you mentioned some type of switch, a word that started with an N. Negroponte?

(Larry Robinson at 00:31:23) The Negroponte switch. What is that? So John Negroponte, who—I can't remember which chair he held at MIT—he talked about a Negroponte switch that—well, he talked about it and it was named after him. That things come along that so upend a particular industry that sort of people that are on the top and people are at the bottom, when the switch occurs, things can just entirely flip around. So at my age, you know, sort of the very first Negroponte switch that was talked about to me was what happened with McCaw Cellular and AT&T.

(Larry Robinson at 00:32:04) So the switch there was our phone lines used to be in the ground. Right? And TV signals used to be in the air. Right? We would broadcast things through satellite.

(Larry Robinson at 00:32:14) Right? So phone lines in the ground, satellite in the air. Where are we at today? Phone lines are in the air. Everything is cell, and TV is all cable, which is buried in the ground.

(Larry Robinson at 00:32:26) So those two things switched. They traded places, and when they did, massive fortunes were won and lost. And so in almost any industry, you can follow through and you'll find these Negroponte, you know, switches that occur. In society, we would call them, you know, schisms that occur. You know, you look at, you know, the Mongol Empire and how they expanded across China into Eastern Europe, and then what caused their demise, and what caused the rise of the Ottoman Empire, and then the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

(Larry Robinson at 00:32:58) And almost all of these things can be traced back to the switches that occur that just totally rewrite the rules of a society or an industry. And are you looking for them? Can you sense them coming, and can you react to them?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:16) Whoa. You just blew my mind. Okay. So hold on a second. Let's back this up. You've got a degree in economics. Can you identify these switches by some sort of economic indicators?

(Larry Robinson at 00:33:30) You know, it's funny. Earlier, you're talking about books, you know, and reading and having knowledge, but then, you know, experience shapes your knowledge. Right? You know, a funny thing that I do with books is, you know, probably like you, I read a lot of stuff, and I discard a lot of stuff, but I hold on to, you know, some gems. And what I do is I'll take these books and I'll kind of mark with, like, you know, yellow tabs good ideas throughout the book.

(Larry Robinson at 00:33:59) And when I'm all done, I'll challenge myself to go through the yellow tabs and switch one of them to red. And the red tab is always the central idea, like, the best idea in the book to me. And I'll put them on my shelf, and very few stay on my shelf. Well, I should say very few even make my shelf. Most books I like—I said, I just read and discard.

(Larry Robinson at 00:34:21) The funnest thing in the world to do, and unfortunately, this takes time, is go back and visit those books five years later, ten years later, fifteen years later now that you have some experience. And number one, you don't reread the whole thing. You go after the yellow tabs and say, "Whoa. Is this information still relevant?" And the thing that I thought was the single most important thing in this book, you know, the red tab, is it still the red tab, or are one of these other things now the most important thing?

(Larry Robinson at 00:34:52) And that journey, which again, you know, takes time, becomes super illuminating on what it is that we knew at one time. Is it practical in another time? So how does this all play into your sort of classic ability to sense and seize opportunity, which was a saying of Jack Welch at GE? You just need cycles. Right? Cycles underneath your belt, cycles in your team to be able to see those things and say, "Ah, this looks like an opportunity."

(Larry Robinson at 00:35:27) That's what our company is seeing with this COVID crisis as the business of real estate. And again, Clear Capital is a valuations company. And what that means is, you know, as soon as you buy a home, Joel, if you're paying cash, Clear Capital has nothing to do with you. But if you're gonna borrow money from someone else like most people do, our company works to tell the lender, the bank, and the investor—right, because banks rarely hold on to loans. They move them back into Wall Street or they move them to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. We work to tell the bank and the eventual investor whether or not the valuation of this home makes sense. And, you know, we're looking at the business of real estate right now, which, if you think about real estate, it's sort of a high engagement relationship-driven business that's all focused around a location, right, an address where you presumably have a seller and a buyer and you got a neighborhood and schools and it requires proximity to the property and all the relationships to make it happen. You know, this pandemic has caused real estate to start to rethink itself.

(Larry Robinson at 00:36:45) Now there were fundamental shifts underway already, but with this pandemic and industry—you know, financial services often changes slowly because of risk—this pandemic has forced this industry to sort of rethink and rewire itself in order to keep the stream moving. You know, the continuity. I mean, if there's one thing that we can bank on, it's that we're all sort of moving toward or wired toward homeownership at some point in our life. And every economic cycle, you know, sort of the peaks and the valleys, people are still gonna buy homes.

(Larry Robinson at 00:37:21) They're gonna have to sell homes, they're gonna buy homes, and we are relooking at how do we keep that water moving through the pipes in an era where people may be hesitant to become proximate to each other. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:38) Proximity.

(Larry Robinson at 00:37:39) Proximity to each other. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:40) It all works. And I love when—I love language because I used to say words that necessarily didn't exist. Right? And my uncle a couple times called me on some stuff. And so I got nerdy, and I started researching. Whenever a debate comes up, I go right to the origin.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:02) That's, like, one of my favorite moves. Like, all right, something's happening. Let's go to the origin of this and learn something. And I happened to do that, and so I started—I took this class on the origins of philosophy and language.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:16) And I found out that the way words become words is through us using them and then making new words. Like, just making the new word and that word catching on is how things enter and exit the dictionaries.

(Larry Robinson at 00:38:31) Amen. This is—I mean, if you look at the OED, you know, every year, the Oxford English Dictionary, every year, like, 1,200 new words are added and 400 words are taken out for exactly the process that you described. So, yeah, I would encourage you to make up a word and just pound it everywhere, and pretty soon you can look at the OED and say, "I started that." And by the way, on language, my mother was an English professor. So, man, if you don't think my life wasn't just full of constant edits and corrections, it was terrible.

(Larry Robinson at 00:39:07) So between a sister that beat me up and a mom that corrected me all the time, I'm—it's a wonder I'm not a frail personality.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:17) Well, you just chose to take some personal responsibility and turn that into strength and leverage it. And that's—so I've got a burning question here. The Negroponte switch—is Clear Capital in the middle of one of those market switches?

(Larry Robinson at 00:39:37) Boy, do we ever think so. I'll give you an example.

(Larry Robinson at 00:39:40) So when a contract is reached on a property, you know, the buyer and seller meet on a price and money is gonna be borrowed, an appraisal, you know, a determination of valuation has to be made. And I won't bore you with all the complications of what goes into truly valuing a home. But one of the most important things is, what's the condition and quality of this home? Does it have underlying problems? Does it have, you know, things that we call functional obsolescence? We're just using the home. There's something weird. And in order to do that, you know, typically an appraiser or a home inspector will go on-site and physically inventory the home, take a bunch of pictures, you know, answer a bunch of questions. Well, you can't do that now.

(Larry Robinson at 00:40:31) Right? You have these professional appraisers and inspectors—they either cannot because of shelter-in-place orders or will not go out to a home. On the flip side of that, you know, only a small percentage of homes that sell are vacant. You have a homeowner sitting inside that home that also doesn't want someone coming in from the outside, and they will be going through every part of the home. Right?

(Larry Robinson at 00:40:58) Every bedroom, every bathroom, opening things up, you know, looking around. So this intruder, if you will, is gonna be coming in and touching and walking around all parts of your home. So how do you give a financial institution confidence that this asset that they're gonna loan money on is in the condition, you know, that they would expect it to be in? So we came up with a way to allow a homeowner to do the inspection on their home and do it in a way that gave both the appraiser and the lender the confidence that nothing was sort of being hidden or obscured that would stop the appraiser from feeling fairly good about the value. And our CEO and executive team decided on March 23rd, "Okay, we wanna do this. We wanna do it for the industry. We're gonna make it free," you know, which is just unheard of in our industry. And basically at noon on March 23rd said, "We're gonna build this, make it free, go fast." And in our company, both product and tech roll up into me.

(Larry Robinson at 00:42:11) So we kicked off the product teams and the tech teams, and we were able to launch this service to the industry for free on April 1st, fully compliant. And there's nothing more satisfying, you know, than when you turn something on and you just watch the meter running. And one of the cool early stories, you know, that came out of that was a homeowner who took the time to let us know that she was seven months pregnant, and they needed—they needed to complete this contract on their home because they were relocating, and she was terrified about having someone come into the home. And we released this inspection app. Her lender, you know, you just text the link to the homeowner and they can start to do it.

(Larry Robinson at 00:42:57) She was able to complete this inspection within 30 minutes, get it, and unlock the transaction and get it going. And so the bank was happy, you know, this newly expectant mother was greatly relieved. That, you know, it's a wonderful story, not a story that we were looking for. We knew that we could help the industry, but then something like that comes through. And like so many things, so many product companies or technology companies, you start to realize that this thing that you created impacts people in ways that you really didn't imagine.

(Larry Robinson at 00:43:35) And for me personally, that's always been the big driver in life behind, you know, building all my companies or helping Clear Capital right now—is the reward that you get from stories like that, told and untold, that just makes so much of it worthwhile. So our, uh, you know, we stood up this getownerinsight.com in eight days. Even a lot of people in the industry were like, "How'd you stand that up in eight days?" And we're like, "Well, two years of hard work before that." Right?

(Larry Robinson at 00:44:07) Because we were able to build that from, you know, really good technology that we had on the shelf already. I kinda liken it to being a chef that already has a pantry of high-quality ingredients and someone says, you know, "Hey, you know, make me a soup." And you're like, "No problem." So we did it in eight days, but we did it because we had two years of just really good work in front of that. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:31) I love it. And I'm actually looking at it right now. The brand looks good too. And the content—it's well done.

(Larry Robinson at 00:44:40) Oh, our marketing team, our director of marketing, John Lyon, just did brilliant work on that. Our EVP of corporate strategy, Keenan Chen, just did a great job of positioning this with our customers. And that's the crazy thing. It's not that the product was stood up or the tech was stood up in eight days. It's that all parts of the organization, right, the head of sales, the head of strategy, the marketing directors, the tech teams, the product teams, the CEO—

(Larry Robinson at 00:45:14) everyone just had to say, "Do this." But, you know, we were talking earlier about the boldness to push through and just go for it. You know, our CEO just said, "I wanna do this," and said, "Go make it happen." And then, you know, like all good executives just got out of the way. Right?

(Larry Robinson at 00:45:34) You know, you build these high-functioning teams and you empower them, and the hardest thing to do as a leadership is just take your hands off of them and let them be great. Really, that—you know, if I caught it right, your children are one and three years old now. I mean, you're at the age, you know, they've already started walking. They're gonna wanna get on the bikes and the skateboard soon, and you sorta wanna show them how to do it. You wanna put your arms around them and, like, "Okay, you can do it." But at some point in time, you just have to step back and say, "Do it. Let's see what happens." There's so many analogies between, you know, being a leader and being a good parent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:17) And you realize so quickly that you can't do it for them because you rob them of their opportunity to learn. You learn that faster in parenting than you do in managing. And managing when the person's that close to you in intellect, it's not as clear. But when it's a child, it's so clear when you rob them of the opportunity to learn because they come back to you and ask you to open it every single time. Like—well, yeah. So—

(Larry Robinson at 00:46:43) The cool thing, you know, you mentioned here on our getownerinsight.com. What's really neat about that too is you'll notice you're able to bring it up and there's no friction. Like, you know, you see it says, "Hey, who's the requester?" You know, that's generally the appraiser or the bank. Are you requesting this? And, okay, who's the homeowner that you want us to send this link to? But, uh, I mean, I would encourage you, Joel, take it for a test drive. There is no gate between you saying, "I'm a requester," so, "I'm gonna pretend I'm the bank," and "I'm also gonna be the homeowner." Put it all in and do your home, and see if when you're all done, you don't feel—number one, I think all great tech products help the user feel successful.

(Larry Robinson at 00:47:28) You know, and in this case, the homeowner feels successful. They're able to tell the story of their home, and it's super easy to use, and the information flows back into the financial system so we can keep things moving. So, yeah, if you have the chance, take it for a test drive. Pretend you're both the bank and the homeowner. You'll have fun with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:48) Yeah. And it's actually pretty interesting because I'll show you, you know, the text from my wife this morning. We were actually looking at different properties.

(Larry Robinson at 00:47:58) There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:59) It's happening, and we were questioning about this going on right now because she got furloughed from her job, so she started redoing cabinets. So she redid our cabinets and then our neighbors were like, "Hey, we want our cabinets," and so she's doing that. And she's made more money redoing cabinets in the past two weeks than she does at her job normally. So she's like, "I'm gonna keep doing this."

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:23) And I said, "Well, great. But we'll probably need some more space, you know, for you to redo it because we live in a pretty tight area." I was like, "Why don't we go out to some place that has, like, an acre of property and maybe we could have some chickens because"—her sister has chickens and we like the eggs. By the way, the eggs from a chicken—like, if you have a family that has chickens—are not even close to the eggs you get from the grocery store. They're, like, a thousand times better.

(Larry Robinson at 00:48:48) Well, and not only that—so I've had chickens myself too. So the first thing you notice is the yolks from the stores are pale yellow, and the yolks from your free-range chickens are deep orange.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:59) Mm-hmm.

(Larry Robinson at 00:49:00) And that's all the omegas—three, sixes and nines—that as the chickens walk around and eat all the different foliage. Yeah. Yeah. Chickens are fun. They're—not only do you get eggs, you find yourself being fiercely protective of them.

(Larry Robinson at 00:49:15) I had some raccoons get into one of my chicken coops one time, and that led to me being underneath my deck with a shotgun and a .22 determined to rescue these chickens from these raccoons who were just totally willing to overpredate and kill them all. So, uh, you will—if you get that property, not only will your wife have a cool workshop, but I encourage you to get your free-range chickens. You'll love them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:44) Oh, yeah. I'm just—at first, she was trying to upgrade. And I was like, "No. No. No."

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:48) I was like, "We don't need a big upgrade. We need, like, a slight upgrade. We need to go from being in an HOA that won't allow us"—like, we have a backyard now, but our HOA will not allow us to put chickens out there or anything, which is a whole other story. But, uh, I was like, "Let's just do an exchange.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:06) Let's just go to a place where we just don't have the HOA, and we could do that." Because, uh, you know, I think that that's becoming a bigger conversation in a lot of families is the health of their food. Like, the food's gotten pretty far out there. And as I'm seeing the kids grow up and as I noticed myself starting to eat from, like, farmers markets and getting neighborhood chicken eggs and stuff like that from her sister, I noticed that there really is a big difference in the quality of the food. Like, it's noticeable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:37) Like, you feel better. It's just better food.

(Larry Robinson at 00:50:40) Yeah. Hey, a good read for you is Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. And his book that he won the Pulitzer for is called Botany of Desire. But this is weird where I would actually say read them out of order. So read The Omnivore's Dilemma first, and then read Botany of Desire.

(Larry Robinson at 00:51:02) And then I think the book that came after that was called In Search of Food or something like that. But, uh, yeah. Start with The Omnivore's Dilemma. It will—it's eye-opening.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:14) So do you have any animals on the property now?

(Larry Robinson at 00:51:17) I have three rat terriers. Chuck and Norris, they're both 11. And then we got a young female that we named Lucy. Remember after the... Was that Scarlett Johansson? And then remember the blue chemical that gave her all the superpowers. So I live on a half-acre parcel that is surrounded by a bunch of three-acre parcels just outside of Sacramento, California. And we, in fact, can keep chickens. So as soon as I get done with a few other projects, the chickens are coming back into our life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:00) That's awesome. I'm curious. I want to know the story. What's with the cards behind you?

(Larry Robinson at 00:52:06) Oh, yeah. There's actually two. And there was a winning hand in Vegas, not a huge amount of money, but I took a picture of the cards, right? Because you got all these different deck manufacturers. So as I threw down this 21, I actually... I think my wife was behind me. She took a picture of it, and she's watching them shove all these chips toward me. And as a memento, she had a diorama made. So those pictures are actually in depth, and they're made out of magazine covers and all sorts of cool things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:42) Oh, wow.

(Larry Robinson at 00:52:42) That ace of spades is like nine layers deep. You can't see the depth from the camera, and same with the jack in there. The attention to detail, the person that made it, you know, is... I think there's a lot of personal representation, you know, being good as a leader, being good at product, being good at tech is paying attention to details that other people never think about or see. And so I like having... I like owning things where you can see that someone really cared and had a real passion for what they created. So yeah, they just look like pictures, but there's actually a huge story behind them and they're pretty neat. So I guess I should ask you, like, the purple pony?

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:31) The purple... That's the unicorn.

(Larry Robinson at 00:53:33) Oh, it's a unicorn? Unicorn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:35) Yeah. So we were at the store shopping for these little trinkets for the wall, and Aria wanted the unicorn. And I said, okay, that would be cool. We'll have that for memory of that, just remember the kids. I got a couple little things that I got. This is an elephant for the... Because there's always an elephant in the room.

(Larry Robinson at 00:54:00) Okay. Yeah. Oh, dude. Look at... You have your finger, like, perfectly... Funny. Good. Like, have you done this before?

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:06) I've done this a couple times.

(Larry Robinson at 00:54:07) Yeah. Yeah. You're very good at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:09) I'll do some show and tell. So we got elephant. I'll give you a behind-the-scenes story of this with a special episode, apparently, today. So I'm on a date with this girl who's not my wife, like, before my wife, just to be clear on the timeline there. And a single bachelor just built a house, no decorations because, you know, you just don't do that when you're a bachelor. And so I'm on this date and I was like, I want that elephant. I just became obsessed. Like, I was like, I'm gonna get that elephant. And it ended up being like $600, but like, I had committed to it before knowing the price. I was like, I thought it was gonna be like $20, but I'm on this first date. And so I have to buy it. And for me, just to give some context, that was like my decorating budget for the entire house. I was like, oh, I spent like $69 to decorate the house. And so I put it up there, and for like three years, everyone would come over and be like, did you just move in? I was like, I spent all my decoration money on the elephant. And so he made his way into the office now. And so I got a little elephant. I got a little guitar because I play guitar. I got a little ampersand because in the language of Ruby, those represent blocks and I don't know. I was just kind of a fan. When I found... I used blocks for a long time and didn't know how they actually worked in the programming language, and then I found out how they actually worked. And I was like, this is brilliant. And so for some reason, I like the ampersand. And then you got some pictures, got some dogs, some kids, children's books from the charity, and some like Iron Man and it's a little owl from one of that companies that has the owl as the mascot. Can't remember right now. Yeah. I got... And you should come when the social distancing is over. We've got the chairs here for the in-person interviews when people come to the office.

(Larry Robinson at 00:55:57) Oh, wow. Well, so this is cool. You have a wall behind you now that for all of your people that tune in in the future, your story is now well known. So... Oh, that's true. Let's see. This is your narrative now. So behind the scenes. Yeah. You said this... We'll just call this a special episode because what? We didn't cover your normal topics?

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:20) No. You came... I will give you a special award for being the most well-prepared guest that I've ever had on. I don't think I've ever had anyone ask me so many questions. I loved it.

(Larry Robinson at 00:56:33) Well, I'll give you a secret here. So most of your shows rightfully have a theme about, you know, the journey of whoever it is that you're talking to and their leadership styles and, you know, how do you find yourself to be effective, et cetera, et cetera. So maybe I could offer to you that this entire interview that you and I did is my leadership secret. I made this more about you than me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:06) I know. I was like blown away. I about, like, halfway through, I was like, he is doing something amazing. But thank you for pointing that out because now I can point people back to this episode and be like, look at... If you want an example of how to do that, look at this episode.

(Larry Robinson at 00:57:23) And that's the journey of life. Right? As we get older, if we hopefully mature and become, you know, fairly introspective, you start to realize that in order to get more of what it is that you want, make sure that the people around you get everything that they want. And then you get this wonderful symbiotic loop going. And when you do that, really powerful things happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:53) It's like a mic drop moment.

(Larry Robinson at 00:57:55) No. Well, I mean, it's 10:00. We could just end right there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:00) Oh, this is great. I kinda don't want it to end, but where do you live? Where are you located?

(Larry Robinson at 00:58:06) So I'm actually in Folsom, California, which is just outside Sacramento as you're heading, you know, toward the Sierra Nevadas, you know, the beautiful mountain range that divides California and Nevada. So very proximate to San Francisco. I've spent a lot of time in the valley, and I built my first two companies outside the valley, although a very prominent law firm, Wilson Sonsini, has been with me since I was 18 years old. Then I spent a fair amount of time in San Francisco working with VCs and helping to mentor their, you know, some of their up-and-coming CEOs and CTOs. And currently at Clear Capital, you know, the founders of this company, Duane Andrews and Kevin Marshall, were just on their own incredible journey. And they asked me to come on board, and I'm at the point in my life where, you know, having built and sold two companies and, you know, I've been a home builder and a restaurateur. I just get so much more satisfaction out of helping people achieve their dreams and what it is that they want because so many people helped me achieve mine. So yeah, really good space to be in right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:24) Oh, dude. This is so good. Okay. So when all the social distancing is over, we're gonna hang out for sure.

(Larry Robinson at 00:59:30) Alright. I'll come to Florida. You can come to California.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:34) Oh, thank you so much. And yeah. This is just... It was a really meaningful conversation at the right time, and I found that some of the best things in life have that synchronicity with them. And they don't happen every day, but sometimes they happen. And I feel like our conversation today was one of them for me. So I really appreciate you coming on and hanging out.

(Larry Robinson at 00:59:52) Pleasure is all mine. Thank you, Joel. And, Jake, I know you're out there. Thank you to you also.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:57) Jake, that was a good call. Right? Thank you so much, Larry.

(Larry Robinson at 01:00:00) Take care, guys. Bye bye. Bye.