John Arrow - CEO at Mutual Mobile

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to John, the CEO at Mutual Mobile, and we discussed the opportunity for a new round of firsts not seen since the release of the iPhone in 2007, pairing new technology with business outcomes, and how most business decisions come down to minimizing pain or maximizing happiness. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:39) What's going on, John?

(John at 00:00:41) Good to see you, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:42) We're just going to hang out and talk. Is that cool?

(John at 00:00:45) I'm looking forward to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:47) How's your day going so far? Is it pretty productive?

(John at 00:00:50) You know, it is. I think there's a bunch of silver linings to this whole pandemic thing. Obviously, there's a lot of hardship that's gone into it for people I know, but I kind of like the break in the routines.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:01) I think that any adequate person can take a difficult situation and find the positive in it.

(John at 00:01:08) Well said. Well said.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:10) Because it's hard to talk about how great it's been to spend time with your family more.

(John at 00:01:18) Yeah. And you see the most interesting parts of humanity when you have those types of hardships, right? This is where you get the innovation. And I think we're seeing a little bit of it at Mutual Mobile too. And so it's fun to kind of witness how people turn a difficult situation into opportunity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:36) Right. And it grows you. The difficult situation is just dealing with them as individuals, so you get to see the people. I got to see the people on my team grow through this because life demanded more out of them to get through this tough spot.

(John at 00:01:50) Totally. Now, are you letting your people work from home? Or how is that going?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:54) Yeah. So we used to all be in this office here, and then when it happened, everybody went home. And we just adjusted our processes a little bit. It wasn't a big deal for us. I mean, we're under 15 people, but the roles are pretty clearly defined and set up well for remote work. And everyone is just really good at what they do, and we didn't skip a beat when we transitioned remotely.

(John at 00:02:21) That's awesome. Yeah. Pretty cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:23) What about you?

(John at 00:02:24) Yeah. We're doing really well with the remote work thing. I mean, what was fascinating just kind of through our discovery into the pandemic is you start to realize that these buildings, these offices, these institutions that existed—they weren't really about the thing of why they were created. Right? We used to think that offices were where people went to go to work. Right? You went to work at your office. That's where productivity got done. Well, it turned out that wasn't the case. Right? Then you think about schools. Kids went there for learning when in reality, the building wasn't where the learning happened. You can do it fine remotely. In fact, you have access to additional course material and professors and teachers that you might not have otherwise. Same thing with churches. Right? Church is a building. That's where people went to worship and to pray. Turns out you can do that remotely too. And so what's fascinating is it turned that whole ideology on its head that we needed a building, that we needed a space for a certain type of activity to occur. And at Mutual Mobile, what we found is our people are more productive when they're able to work remotely. I mean, if you think about engineering and design, yes, there is a team element to it, and it's important to have people from your craft that you get to interact with and that you get to share ideas with. In reality, though, when you're producing, when you're the ones that are creating, more often than not in that office environment, you're going to have distractions. You're going to have interruptions, and it's going to reflect in the work. And so we've seen very high positives from it. The one downside is you don't get that same social camaraderie, but there's other ways to address that. I was hoping, selfishly, that VR was going to be the way that that occurred. If there was ever a moment for virtual reality, it was this pandemic. Right? And sadly, we haven't seen that yet. I have some theories why, which we can get into later when we will see that. But I was hoping this would be the VR moment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:15) Me too. Have you seen the booth thing that they have?

(John at 00:04:18) Which one?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:19) It looks like a telephone booth. Right?

(John at 00:04:22) Uh-huh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:22) But it costs like $60,000. They're talking about using it for artists so they could put one of these booths on stage and they could stream.

(John at 00:04:31) Oh, I have seen that. The telepresence thing? Yeah. That is wild. I'm blanking on the name of the company now. I talked to the founder, but I think if you extrapolate where that's at today and you imagine where it's going to be five years from now, people aren't even going to go to concerts. You're just going to turn that on. You know? It's going to be quite impressive.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:50) I look forward to when it's like a room. You'll have an office at your house. Right? And that room will maybe be kind of like a green screen style room, and you might be able to see your coworkers. And I don't know. I don't know what it'll be like. But—

(John at 00:05:06) One of the ideas that we've been toying with at Mutual Mobile, as a part of an R&D effort, is if you think about why so much business travel happened, most of the time it was for a pretty quick meeting. Right? You'd fly from, I don't know, New York to Los Angeles, four and a half hour flight. You'd have a meeting with investors or with a customer or with someone you were interested in hiring, and then you'd head back. And yeah, it was great to get that handshake and that lunch or that dinner in, but in reality most of the cost, most of the time was in transit. So what if instead of an airport or seaport, you had what we're calling a photon port? And the way the photon port would be would be half technology and half theater. Right? So you'd go down to some location in your city. There'd be these amazing booths or basically telepresence solutions set up. Everybody would have an identical setup. So there'd be a table. There would be screens, and it would be arranged in a way that you would have the same experience as them a thousand miles away. You'd be connected through something like the HoloLens or through some type of other AR headset, and then you'd be able to have that experience. It wouldn't be as good. Of course, nothing beats the real thing. I wish we could be together today in person. It would be close, though. It'd be a hell of a lot cheaper.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:23) I love the photon port idea. I've never thought of that, where there's a place you would go to have this meeting. And what if—it'd be so cool if you could actually transmit the exact photons quantumly or something to the person. Because one of the things I've been thinking a lot about is there's this certain energy that exists when you're in person having a conversation. I can have more conversations in person and back-to-back meetings than I can in back-to-back Zooms because I can feed off of people's energy in a different way. And when whoever figures that out—how to get that aspect to transfer over long distances—I think they're going to win.

(John at 00:07:05) I agree. I mean, that's always been the challenge with communication is that you almost have this thermal intensity of communication. Right? So the coldest form of communication might be something like, I don't know, back in the day, sending a fax. Right? It's super impersonal. You don't really get any type of interpersonal feedback without a long, long delay. You start warming it up a little bit. Maybe you go from a fax to a written letter or to an email. Email is right in the middle. It's neutral. It's not really cold. It's not really hot. You start increasing the warmth a little bit more. You get to text message or a phone call. And that's the problem—we don't really have anything in an intermediary setting between a phone call really or a FaceTime call, what we're doing right now, and that in-person interaction. Things like a photon port, things like what Apple's going to be releasing soon with their headset, which we can talk about a little bit later—I have a bit of special insight there—that's going to potentially bridge that, I think, that connection between where we're at now and the whole, you know, meeting in the flesh thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:08) I like you. You like different types of technology. You seem very creative. When did you realize that you were really interested in technology and that you had this ability to create and think outside the box?

(John at 00:08:20) I love the question. And hopefully, I'm going to try to tone it down on being too interested in technology. I think one of my faults and one of the faults of just people who are excited about technology is we see it as the answer to everything. Right? It's really easy to almost develop a fetish for new types of technology. But in reality, it's not about the tech, unfortunately. It's about kind of the business outcomes that can be produced. And so quickly, when I started kind of falling in love with computers and the Internet growing up, I was that kid who was five or six years old and literally trying to put floppy disks in anything that I could. You start to realize that, you know, by itself, technology is not that special. It's fun. It's interesting. You really need to combine it with the true business outcome. And that's one of the things—before we started Mutual Mobile, myself and my cofounders had done things in tech, and we realized that you don't get the leverage unless you attach it to a real problem. Starting Mutual Mobile, one of the first things that we did is we wanted to kind of get that gimmicky thing out of our systems that tech can do. So back when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007, we knew we wanted to do a company around mobile. 2008, it ships. Right? 2009, the App Store goes live. And so we said, look, we want to have one of the first apps in the App Store no matter what. And so we made this super gimmicky app just to get it out of our systems. It was called HangTime. Do you ever happen to hear of HangTime?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:54) In my research for this episode, yeah.

(John at 00:09:56) Okay. Well, sorry for you about that. I'll just give the real quick summary of that because I think it'll provide a good segue to where we used to think about technology and how we think about it today. HangTime, for those of you listeners who aren't familiar, was this super gimmicky app. I'm not going to defend it, but it was one of the first 50 apps in the App Store. And the premise was using the accelerometer in the phone. You could take your iPhone and you could toss it up in the air and record how long it was in a free fall state. And so that throw that I just did was maybe a tenth of a second at most. But using the accelerometer, you could do longer and longer throws and record those. We sold this app for 99 cents. The only reason that we got people downloading and buying and getting Mutual Mobile's first app—today we have literally thousands of apps in the App Store—but the only reason it got downloaded was it was early and people wanted to show off their new phone that they purchased. And sure enough, people started downloading it and they'd bring it home and they'd show their friends and their neighbors them jeopardizing this new piece of tech that they had just purchased. Right? So what ends up happening is before we know it, everybody has it. We have a leaderboard. That's the one novel thing that we did with this application. And the scores started to rise. So people went to the top of their apartment complex. They wrapped it in bubble wrap. They chucked it off the building, and the scores started to hit the four or five second mark, which is really, really high. Right? And before you knew it, that was kind of the thing. They leveled out there. We said that was fun. Let's go start that real company that's not focused on the gimmicky side of technology, but focused on how we can solve real business problems, how we can have outcomes. Didn't even think about HangTime for a long time. Happened to check the scoreboard a month or two later, and we see the score out there for like nineteen point six seconds. We figured out that somebody must have broken it or hacked it, and we didn't want the very first piece of software that we released as having this bug. Right? We wanted to start on a good slate. So we contacted the guy. We said, hey, do you mind telling us how you broke our app? How you tricked it? And he was almost offended by that comment. And he says, look, no, no, no. I didn't break your app. I took it skydiving. And, you know, sure enough, as soon as we learned that information, more and more people started jumping out of planes with it. And it became somewhat of a cult following. Apple finds out about it. They ban it from the store because they didn't want anyone to die over it, which makes sense. And it's also how we won our first award ever as a company. I think Gizmodo ranked it the second dumbest iPhone app of all time. So it's not an award we have up on our shelf, but it was kind of how we got our start as a company in technology. We realized, well, this is what we did on our own, but what if we could take in that whole know-how and applied it to a real problem, something that was high stakes? And we started looking at healthcare. Realized that if you're in healthcare, and obviously today during the pandemic, that's a bigger focus than anything. How can you use technology to create leveraged outcomes? And we started doing that back in 2009 when we started the company and scaled it up to 300 people that way. We're doing it again. When the pandemic broke, when the news of it first broke in Wuhan, we had no idea it was going to come over to the United States. But our team decided it would be interesting to start doing hackathons to figure out how we could leverage technology to mitigate some of the just the hardship that was going to occur from that. So we made some of the first contact tracing applications and nonprofits associated with that effort, some that are still used today. And so we're really proud about when we think of technology and we're interested in it. Yes, I get so excited about the new things that are coming out. But where my mind goes and where our people's minds go is more how can we leverage that to a real meaningful outcome as opposed to something that's a bit of a gimmick and fun to geek out on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:45) So you had some—what else came out of the hackathon? What was some of the different things that came out?

(John at 00:13:51) Yeah. So one of the things that—some news that just broke on one of the companies that we helped start called Safe Return. One of our cofounders is involved in it. Mutual Mobile built the first technology. It allows basically companies to open up again, open up their physical spaces. My company, probably your company, it's not imperative that we're back in the office. We can do what we do relatively well remotely.

(John at 00:14:13) There's some organizations where it's just impossible. You're not going to be able to open a grocery store remotely. You're not going to be able to open a hospital remotely. There's these mission-critical places that need to get people back to work. So we created a suite of solutions that effectively allows people to self-diagnose and say, "Hey, I might have had COVID-19," and it uses the GPS tracking to notify those people automatically. Similarly, if a company wants to roll out testing and they want to do it on a cadence, you know, daily or weekly or whatever, that application will fit into their ERP and allow them to start bringing people back to work—not in a fail-safe way, but in a much safer way than if they didn't do anything. And so really happy to announce that company just closed a $10 million round for 50 states.

(John at 00:15:02) So that was something that was literally seven months old and it came out of that effort, and it's already being used by a good chunk of the Fortune 100 that have to open.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:11) Yeah, that's really useful, right? Because they need some sort of guidelines in order to do that. And I was just thinking about H-E-B. They're this large grocery chain in Texas, and I talked to them a few months ago and they had some really cool innovative tech people. So I was like, maybe H-E-B could use that.

(John at 00:15:30) Totally. I don't know if you knew this or not, but H-E-B is one of Mutual Mobile's customers. So we built their suite of shopping solutions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:37) Oh, nice. Nice.

(John at 00:15:38) Yep. So we're very fortunate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:40) That's so cool. Man, what a small world.

(John at 00:15:42) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:42) Oh, because you're in Texas, right?

(John at 00:15:44) That's right. We got—you're home of H-E-B. We don't have Safeways here. Austin, Texas. It's funny because you're seeing this kind of mass exodus from around the country to here, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:56) Yeah. I just was out there two months ago looking to relocate. We explored a little bit north, like Dallas-Fort Worth area. And now we have some friends that just moved out to a place called Plano, which is—so we live in this little area called Lakewood Ranch, right?

(John at 00:16:15) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:15) And it's got a specific style, right? There's a specific density to it. There's a quality to it. And we were looking for places that had this similar feel, but just in a different climate. And we did a climate map and we saw that Texas was—a large part of Texas was in the climate that we wanted. And because we're in Florida, it's really hot and we just want a little less hot.

(John at 00:16:39) We don't want cold-cold. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:42) And we saw that that Texas area matched, and so we started exploring. And then our friends ended up selling their home and moving out, and they said Plano is like the Lakewood Ranch of Texas. We should go check that out. So now that's our next spot to check out. You like Texas? Were you born there?

(John at 00:16:57) I wasn't born there, but I grew up there. So in Texas, we care about the distinction a lot. You can't claim to be a Texan unless you're actually born here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:05) That's right. My dad's whole family is from Lubbock.

(John at 00:17:09) Okay. Yeah. Great. Well, I like Lubbock. That's the Palo Duro Ranch area up there. Beautiful part of the state. Plano's a good option, though. You know, you have more corporate headquarters in Plano than I think anywhere else in the country.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:21) Oh, really?

(John at 00:17:22) I could—fact-check me on that, but it's either one or two. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:27) So you stay there, though? You like it?

(John at 00:17:30) Mm-hmm. It's a good—it's a good place to, I would say, get things done. If you think about New York City, it's a great place to be inspired. The clock in Austin definitely ticks at half speed. That can be a good thing, though, for executing. It means it's less distractions, right? If you think about—we always like to think about cities as you can kind of sum up any great city in the world with a question, right? New York's question, as soon as you get off the plane at JFK or Newark, is probably, for better or worse, "What's your net worth?" Right? That's kind of how people measure things. You look at the skylines there. You see Wall Street. It kind of boils down to that, a number. You go to somewhere like Boston where you have Harvard and MIT and BU right next to each other. It's, "What are you learning? What do you know?" L.A., it's probably "Who do you know?" is the question. San Francisco, it used to be "What are you doing to change the world?" I've rethought that—maybe it's "Where are you moving to?" But Austin's is a bit different, right? It's way more about being present. It's way more ephemeral than a ton of different places. And if you go to a coffee shop in any of those cities that I just mentioned and you listen to the conversations and you kind of try to overhear what people are talking about, it gives you a nexus into what those places are about. And in Austin, it's way more—in Silicon Valley, it's going to be about some new fundraising or some new startup. In Austin, it's way more "When are we going to the lake later? When are we going to hit 6th Street or something?" That's good from a quality-of-life standpoint, and I think it's a great place to build companies. I would still recommend if you move to Texas, make sure you spend other places to get recharged. But it's an equidistant location. You can get either coast in the same amount of time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:15) And they have all the rockets there.

(John at 00:19:17) SpaceX is huge here. I was really fortunate to get to invest in SpaceX. I've been following that somewhat closely. And I went down to see the Starship launch, SN8 two weeks ago, and it was a wild experience. So Elon's here. Oracle's coming here. Probably the next big epicenter. And now you're coming here, so that will make it official.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:39) Yeah. Yes. Do you know Firefly yet?

(John at 00:19:42) Oh, yeah. You know those guys?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:43) Yeah. Oh, I got to interview them a couple weeks ago. Super, super cool. They have that turducken thing. They've got the space vehicle in the vehicle, and it's supposed to be able to tow around space stuff like satellites. And I'm really excited to watch them with their launch as well.

(John at 00:20:00) Way to describe it, right? Cool. Hopefully, you'll be here to see it because one of the—I mean, it's almost a spiritual experience to see a rocket launch. I mean, you see the culmination of humanity, right? And the crazy thing is you have not only SpaceX, but you have Blue Origin here. And Jeff's goal—he said he wants to make kind of the cost of getting involved into space startups the same as internet startups. And by putting that foundation there with Starlink and the other infrastructures, it's going to do just that, right? You're going to be in a situation where you're going to be able to load software payloads up to these satellites and effectively treat them like you might treat apps. SpaceX, mark my word—they don't have special insight here—but I predict they're going to release something called the Space Phone. And it's going to compete with the iPhone, all based on the Starlink network. And so you're going to have a whole new kind of slew of innovation around mobile soon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:57) I'm very excited. Not special information.

(John at 00:21:00) Not special information. Just my prediction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:02) We had some guests on that happened to be in a close group to Elon, and they had the Starlink betas already. And because we wanted to be—to do one of the first recorded episodes over Starlink, like the first podcast to do an episode over Starlink. And we're like, we need someone with the Starlink. And so we're combing through our contacts and trying to get someone to agree—even if it's just one-sided, even if just the guest has the Starlink, I still think that would count.

(John at 00:21:29) That would totally count. I don't know if there's been a podcast done on it yet. That would be—let me tweet Elon and see if that could happen, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:36) Please. Yeah. We're contacting their—see, Starlink doesn't have its own PR. Starlink falls under its parent company SpaceX's PR. Mm-hmm. So we were trying to hunt down—their website's very minimal, right? We were trying to hunt down who's the human behind this project that we could just get a yes from their PR team. So we're working on it, though.

(John at 00:21:58) And you kind of take that one step further. There's going to be a whole new round of firsts as it related to this technology. You're not only going to be able to do the first podcast over Starlink. You could go anywhere on the planet soon, right? You could go to the middle of the Pacific Ocean or Antarctica and have internet that's just as fast or even faster than we might have right now, which will be wild. And it'll mean so much to the rest of the world, right? All of these Sub-Saharan Africa locations, places in rural India will now have this great equalizer. They will have access to the same type of connectivity that we do. And think about all the businesses and new customers it's going to result in for our planet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:35) I wanted to build—I was asking how much it cost per pound. I think it was $10,000 a pound because I wanted to build a small Raspberry Pi satellite-type thing and pay someone and put it up there. And I think—and just so I could sit there with my kids and be like, "Hey, we're moving a satellite around in space."

(John at 00:22:55) That would be the best birthday present ever for a kid to say, "Look, I got you this satellite up there." How amazing would that be?

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:02) Right? And then all of a sudden it gets towed away by the Firefly space utility vehicle.

(John at 00:23:08) I love it. If you do that, let me know. I'll be there to watch it. The live stream for it, for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:13) Have you gotten to see a rocket launch in person?

(John at 00:23:16) Oh, yeah. I've gotten to see—I saw a Falcon Heavy launch out of Space Coast. And then I saw two weeks ago SN8. And it's wild. I mean, you just—you realize how difficult of an endeavor it is. It's the loudest, brightest thing you've ever seen. And it gives you so much inspiration and hope for humanity when you realize what we're—what's possible and that we pulled that off. And most likely, it's going to get even more impressive, right? We're going to start seeing a launch every other week is what I've heard from Elon on Starship.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:50) Yeah. I'm so excited. Just I saw around Christmas time, just a few weeks ago. We had our Christmas party. We brought everyone in for it and we had a dinner. And when we were leaving the dinner, someone was like, "Oh, I think there's a launch tonight." And they pulled it up and two minutes later, we just saw the edge of the engine because we're in Florida, right? We just saw it. And then it started to curve. So we didn't see it for long, but we did. How cool. Yeah. We saw that bright, you know, orange glow in the night going and arcing, and I was so pumped up about that. I was like, "Alright, we're going to go get an RV trailer thing that we can tow, you know, camper thing, and we are going to go see some space launches," and that's something that I really want to do in life. So, you know, we got the camper and stuff. That was the family Christmas thing. And now we're going to go out and watch some launches.

(John at 00:24:50) How cool. Do you think you'll want to go to space someday?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:53) Oh, do I want to go? I want to go to space right now. Oh, I would totally do it.

(John at 00:24:58) Well, I mean, I think—let me maybe rephrase the question. How—okay. Let's say that there's a 95% chance that you come back safely. Is that high enough, or would you need higher?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:08) Oh, what's my risk tolerance for it?

(John at 00:25:11) Yeah. For something like that. Because I think that's the question we're going to all be faced with pretty soon, probably this decade.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:17) Oh, yeah. So my risk tolerance for it would be—I don't know. I would need to know somebody that's done it, and they'd probably have to be somebody that I respect a lot and have a personal relationship with them. For some reason that tends to be what gets me comfortable with things. Statistics are great and it's important, but just knowing people that have done it and it's okay. Also, I'd probably say easily if it were equal to the ratio of safe flights, then I would be okay. Like, I'm just coming up with this right now, my friend. I didn't have this pre-thought.

(John at 00:25:59) That's interesting to hear.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:00) Yeah. If it were equal to the ratio of airplanes or car safety, because I take the risk of getting in a car every day, essentially. Mm-hmm. I take the risk of flying on an airplane. So if it was similar risk profiles, then I would do it without caring. I just want to go up. I want to do a couple backflips, eat a meal, pee in a bag, and then come on back, right?

(John at 00:26:24) The whole experience. The whole experience. Well, the whole suborbital thing, right, that's coming with those hops, quickest way to get anywhere on the planet. That's going to be crazy. You're going to get to do that and go somewhere, and it's going to be probably in that risk profile. Not initially, but eventually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:39) So who's doing the hops? Branson's doing the tourism, but tourism isn't a hop. The hop is commercial, right?

(John at 00:26:45) Yeah. I think those are all going to be literal stepping stones, basically, right, to getting to using it as a form of transportation. Because nobody wants to just go up and go back down. That's not, I don't think, that exciting. That's like an amusement ride. The way that SpaceX is doing it with using it as a form of transportation where you could go from New York to Shanghai, right, in 40 minutes flat—that's got some utility. You get the whole space experience. You get to pee in the bag, probably, if you can't hold it. And then you come back down and you're somewhere new, right? And you're an astronaut. You crossed the Kármán line. You went up 100 miles, and you could commute back to New York that same day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:23) So you're a pilot. What's your threshold for this?

(John at 00:27:25) I like the way that you think about it, right? We should try to approach something that's as close to zero, right? If you look at aviation, at least commercial aviation crashes in the United States over the last decade, it's zero. It really is. There was that Southwest passenger that got sucked out of the plane, unfortunately. But in terms of total aircraft losses and people dying, it's zero. I don't see why we can't get that way with space in the far future and in the near future with vehicles. We've been really close to, at Mutual Mobile, close to kind of the self-driving revolution. We've gotten to see the potential there and work with executives at Ford, and that's going to be how we hit zero. It's don't let people drive. They're not good at it. We've explained—we've seen many, many cases, right? You think about COVID-19 and all of the fatalities that are occurring around the world due to that. It's only slightly higher than how many people die every year in the world due to car accidents and pedestrians. It's a public health crisis, and it's one that we can stop, right? We had Warp Speed to create this vaccine that's going to hopefully do wonders. Well, with technology, we can stop cars from hitting people. We can stop cars from hitting other cars. And it's going to be something that we see this decade if we see the same motivation that we saw for vaccines.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:44) Right? If the money is there, and that's why I get excited about things that are backed with business outcomes. Like, new technology is exciting, but new technology that has a—like, when I heard of Neuralink, I was like, this is great. But the real great thing is that it's hearing stuff and it's an order of magnitude better than the current brain-computer interfaces, meaning it'll hook into a business process and then it'll slowly evolve over time, build cash, improve, and, you know, ten, twenty years out, we have the dream of the Neuralink, what it could really do, or there's like an app store on our head type deal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:16) But when things are coming out that don't grasp and they're real strong and hard, then I'm like, oh, that's really cool. It's a promising technology, but it may just not be for today, you know?

(John at 00:29:30) Exactly. And it doesn't need to be this great leap, I think, to have those types of outcomes. In the early days of Mutual Mobile, one of our first initiatives was working with a healthcare company to figure out how to reduce medical errors. Back then, eight times more people were dying in the United States every year due to medical errors than car accidents. And all we did was we started looking at that workflow. We said, why is this happening? Most of the medical errors were happening because of something getting lost in translation when you had a paper and pen, incumbent technology there. A nurse would write down something incorrectly, either the wrong medication, and most of the time it would be no big deal.

(John at 00:30:06) But every so often, and it adds up, someone would get an order of magnitude more dosage of a medicine and it would kill them. So we created a solution that just said, let's not have an interim step to getting this into the EMR. Let's just make it so that it goes from your phone, goes from a tablet into the EMR. What would happen? Sure enough, that started going down.

(John at 00:30:26) Medical errors started going away. And that was so simple. That was the low-hanging fruit. You start extrapolating this outward like you were saying, and it's gonna have profound, profound positive implications.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:38) So is Mutual Mobile this vehicle that allows you to work across all of these broad sections? Like, tell me, you guys make apps for companies, H-E-B you mentioned, healthcare. How do you explain or describe Mutual Mobile to people?

(John at 00:30:52) That's a great question. So we basically try to figure out how to use emerging technology to help the world's most significant companies drive business outcomes. And that's not always Fortune 100. It's not always Fortune 1000. Sometimes it's new startups that are trying to launch a product.

(John at 00:31:08) I've been very fortunate from my vantage point. I've gotten to talk to literally thousands of CTOs over the years. Many of them have customers, many of them are peers. And as a result, I've kind of seen what's worked and what hasn't worked, as has our team. Our president, Pradeep, who is doing an amazing job, gets to take a diagnostic approach and says every day tries to talk companies out of embracing new emerging technologies.

(John at 00:31:34) Right? Just like a new drug, they can cause more damage, and we feel something akin to the Hippocratic Oath. Look, first do no harm. Right? And so we take a completely agnostic approach.

(John at 00:31:45) We don't push any specific technology. When we first start talking with the customer, great example is Google. We worked with Google to build Google Wallet. And this was a product that, you know, you think very high priority, they would wanna do it in-house, but they realized that they had blind spots as it related to iOS specifically. And we looked at the options there.

(John at 00:32:06) We realized, look, we should do less here. We should provide that minimum base level functionality before we move into higher areas. And so every type of customer that we work with, we take that same approach. We were really fortunate to get to work with Garrett Camp, who was the first CEO of Uber, on a separate initiative, and he taught us a lesson that was so valuable. If you think about the founding story of Uber, we all know, you know, they were in Paris, him and Travis, and they were trying to cross the street at the Arc de Triomphe to get a ride, to a taxi, and it was dangerous and they wanted to use an app to call the car.

(John at 00:32:40) What they don't tell you is that for the first six months of Uber, arguably the most valuable app company today, they didn't have an app. They didn't have technology. It was literally text message your location to an operator. That operator will connect you with the vehicle. It was all jazz hands as it related to what was happening behind the scenes that allowed them to figure out what they should build.

(John at 00:33:04) And so when I look at technology and what Mutual Mobile does, a lot of times it's focusing and trying to get our customers to not initially embrace the newest thing, but instead to get the foundational elements right. Because when you do that, you know, great things happen. One of the customers that I'm just most thrilled and proud of where we did exactly that is a customer called Southwire out of Atlanta. Southwire is your prototypical company that isn't technology-backed currently. They were running a $5 billion a year wire company on an Excel spreadsheet, selling wire, electrical wire.

(John at 00:33:38) It's the wire probably in your house, your office. They're number one. And you think about running a $5 billion a year company off of an Excel spreadsheet and how difficult that would be. Right? Literally, the spreadsheet would take fifteen minutes to load if it loaded before it crashed.

(John at 00:33:55) Then if one thing was wrong on it, one cell was wrong on the spreadsheet, they would end up shipping an order incorrectly, and it would cost them $2 million to reclaim that. So, again, really simple thing that we did. We could have added AR from day one. We could have added voice UI and done a ton of fun things. We said, look, let's just do the very, very simple thing first and figure out how to make it so that interface doesn't lead to these expensive $2 million errors.

(John at 00:34:11) We did that. It's generated nearly $500 million in value for their company. And we're working with them today on now all of the fun and sexy solutions that do use new technologies to achieve even more value. So you'll never hear me trying to advocate that companies jump in headfirst to the newest new thing. Let's do the easy things first, and then add on the things that are more exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:43) I fully agree. As you're talking, I have this highlight reel going through my head of all the painful experiences I had learning these lessons you're describing.

(John at 00:34:54) Hopefully just once. Hopefully you just had to learn each one once. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:57) Most of them, but yeah. Some of them a couple times, but or a different way, you know, because I went from engineer into business-type path. And I just found that it was more interesting because I could, as one engineer, I could write so much code. But then if I had a team, and then if I had teams of teams, and then if I started to understand the business thing about how all of this exists, I grew a lot, but yet to focus on outcomes as we were talking about earlier. But yeah, just as you're talking, thinking about all the different—engineers will gravitate towards the shiny technology because it's the new interesting thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:36) But I was always surprised because I would see a company and they would have, like, they wouldn't have a polished logo. Right? Or their website wouldn't look great, but I'd find out that they make $100 million a year. I was like, how is that possible? You know, their brand doesn't look awesome and shiny.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:50) How are they making so much money? Or their technology isn't great. How do they sell for so much money? And that curiosity to figure those things out drew me just farther and farther into the business world. And then I realized how value works and currency and how exchange of value works between people and businesses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:09) And you just have to be of value, and then that will get exchanged. And then it's about understanding the exchange rates and what services you're providing. And then it's ultimately so weird because it's incredibly cliche, but it's just about helping people. Right? Because that's what we do.

(John at 00:36:25) And, you know, to that point, helping people, I mean, that's what a CTO does, is ultimately it's probably the classic example of servant leadership to employees. And I feel like out of the entire executive suite, that's probably the most difficult position because they're having to really fight wars on two fronts. One front is they're the autoimmune system. Right? Everybody wants to bring in new technology, try new things. Well, any one of those could lead to a cataclysmic data breach, right, and literally end the company's existence. And so that's gotta be priority number one. Priority number two is, you know, how do we use new technology to grow the business and accelerate our mission? And a lot of times those are at odds with each other.

(John at 00:37:07) Right? And the CTO is, in many cases, stuck in the middle. So I feel like the best type of CTO, you know, maybe—I was just thinking about this this morning before we jumped on the call—it really shouldn't be Chief Technology Officer anymore. It should be maybe Chief Trying Officer or Chief Testing Officer, because that's what their job really entails in doing that testing and that trying in a meaningful way. If you look at the backlog of suggestions that the CTO gets every day, I'm sure that list is just gargantuan.

(John at 00:37:39) Right? And they have to know which ones are worth testing, which ones should get thrown out, which ones are dangerous. I've had somewhat of a challenge myself, and how do you triage things that you should do for your company and for your clients' companies? And I came across a really kind of great heuristic to doing that. So I'm fortunate. I got to meet Tim Ferriss. I found out he's my neighbor at the building here in Austin, another person who moved here. And I've started diving into some of his teachings and learnings. And he says, look, you know, everybody has so many things on their plate at any given time.

(John at 00:38:10) We have our to-do list. How do we possibly prioritize and triage what we should do? And what Tim says is, look, try to pick the one thing, like a domino, that if you push that over, all of the others will fall into place. Or in lieu of that, pick the one thing that if that succeeds, none of the other things really matter. And I've taken that to heart.

(John at 00:38:33) And it makes those types of lists much more manageable when you approach it from that perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:38) Yeah. I'm a big fan of Tim's and his teachings, his book. Like, a variation of that has actually seeped into my routine over the past two years. And it's every day we figure out, like, what's the most important thing. You know, what's the thing that's gonna change everything?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:54) Where's the highlight of my day? Right? Like, so today, this podcast is the highlight of my day. So I wake up, I look at my schedule—

(John at 00:39:02) Likewise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:02) —I've got all these things and I'm like, what's the one thing that I have to nail? And then everything else can just be side items around it, like doing some tax stuff this morning or whatever. Everything else is just in the background noise, and then there's the one thing that's gotta be, that is gonna be awesome today.

(John at 00:39:22) I love that perspective. I think that if people just operate with that, it means that most of the workday gets freed up, and perhaps that's why people are being so much more productive by working at home. They're not pulled in a ton of different directions. Right? And it just really clears and amplifies the paths that matter.

(John at 00:39:39) One of the things that's amazed me during the pandemic that we've seen is the level of consolidation. Right? I mean, you've just seen so much M&A happening. Many of our customers have gotten acquired. Many of them have been doing the acquiring.

(John at 00:39:52) And the reason is they're not bombarded by these day-to-day business tasks. I think it says, look, if we really want to hit our growth goals, if we want to serve our customers effectively, M&A is the strategy. And I think that's great, and I'm certainly an advocate when they're able to do that. One thing that I encourage many of our customers to consider, and many of the listeners as well, is instead of using the M&A tool, which is a powerful tool, think about building. In most cases, it's cheaper and more effective to build that capability, that company in-house than it is to go on a buying spree. Right? For $100 million, you can build quite a bit in-house, and you can probably get something that's a much, much better fit than if you go on a shopping spree.

(John at 00:40:37) And that's where we really come in. And I think Mutual Mobile is the most effective—is we help companies build organizations and technology products that they would otherwise have to buy. A great example of that is we worked with Cox Automotive to create this company called Flex Drive, which is one of the first car-sharing automotive programs. It allowed people to effectively have a car delivered to them. They could swap it out on a weekly or monthly basis, drive something different.

(John at 00:41:02) They were going on a trip and didn't wanna pay for it, car would get picked up and taken away. And it's something that's used widely to this day. It was recently acquired by Lyft because it had value to give their drivers vehicles who wouldn't have them otherwise. But that was something that if they had gone out and tried to buy it, it would have probably cost them $500 million. And they were able to work with us and build it for a fraction of that, a rounding error of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:28) That's amazing. Yeah. When I was looking at your customer list, and I was just—I was thinking, like, okay, how do these companies decide to use you? Like, what's the internal process where they start to evaluate you as a provider, and where do you come into their life cycle?

(John at 00:41:48) Yeah. It's a great question. The way that I start thinking about it is it's almost like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs for companies or for CTOs. Right? At the very baseline, you have, just like with people, physiological needs.

(John at 00:41:58) If you don't have air, food, or water, nothing else really matters. There's some companies that are dealing with issues that need to be addressed yesterday. And so we can provide a ton of value in that we have a team on the bench that can immediately take care of immediate product needs or maintenance needs and basically patch the boat. So a lot of our customers initially come to us in emergency situations like that where it's obviously not our preferred way of starting. We'd rather work with companies that aren't having to go through that because, you know, I know it's a difficult place to be.

(John at 00:42:28) So that's one. And I'd say on the other end, we work with companies that are closer to the self-actualizing area, the ones where they have everything in order, they're ready to do a new product initiative, and they've preemptively realized that the onslaught from Amazon, Google, Facebook is coming, and they wanna prepare for it. You mentioned H-E-B. H-E-B, customer of ours, is a fantastic example of someone that was ahead of the game. They realized that Amazon was going to be out on a tear many years ago, and they've done a fantastic job building products that allowed them to defend from that onslaught.

(John at 00:43:03) So much of our book of business today, much of the customers that we get to collaborate with are taking the steps to remain competitive in this new world where Amazon's at the forefront. And one thing that is kind of a fun game that I like to play is something—you know, give me an industry where Amazon or Google or Facebook isn't going to dominate, and it's almost impossible to come up with one. Like, you think about wild things. You think about airlines. Right?

(John at 00:43:29) Surely, no. But no. Right? SpaceX is doing stuff there. Amazon's gonna do their own rocket system there.

(John at 00:43:34) Google's already doing it by democratizing how people buy flights. It's almost impossible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:39) I just saw an article today that Amazon bought some jumbo jets.

(John at 00:43:43) Oh, wow. Was it Atlas? I haven't checked the news.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:47) I saw the headline. It literally came through today on this newsletter I read, and it said Amazon buys jumbo jets. Like, they put in a giant order to buy some jumbo jets. And I was like, oh, that's exciting. Because you've got Amazon, then you've got Origin, who's very actively doing space flight. And then everyone's been—I read something because my father-in-law works for UPS for like thirty years.

(John at 00:44:10) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:11) And the first Thanksgiving conversation I had with him, like six years ago, was about automation is never gonna happen. And like, it's too complicated and the truck drivers will never go anywhere. So I continuously feed him updates about—I think like one of the semi trucks completed its first autonomous delivery. I have a lot of fun. I also make sure to ship them all their Christmas presents and birthday presents with FedEx.

(John at 00:44:35) Yeah. Oh, that's so sweet of you. I truly love that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:39) He loves it. Yeah. But, um, yeah, I actually completely forgot what I was talking about because I love having fun with that guy.

(John at 00:44:48) It is relevant to what you're talking about. You're talking about kind of why customers come, you know, to us. And it's to basically, a lot of times, to fend off competition preemptively. If you think about why people spend money, and I'd say companies are made of people, right, so it's really the same analogy. It's for one of two reasons. People spend money to mitigate or maybe rather to minimize pain in some way, or it's to maximize happiness or the chance of happiness. Right?

(John at 00:45:14) So a company coming in, maybe it's UPS—right, we haven't worked with UPS yet—but it would be around, you know, if we spend these dollars today, will it mean that we avoid losing market share? And that's the minimization of pain. Right? And that translates to people. Well, if we're able to maintain or increase market share, it means that myself and my coworkers will get some incentive bonus or our stock price will go up, then the happiness occurs. And so we try to—we don't try to get too philosophical at Mutual Mobile. Like, we don't go super deep, but we realize all the stakeholders that we work with, they're not just trying to hit goals for their company. They're trying to hit goals internally for themselves and their team.

(John at 00:45:53) How can we work backwards? Right? If we start with a P&L and we say, look, we wanna drive an order of magnitude increase in earnings using technology, how can we do that in an effective way? And how can we produce results next quarter as opposed to next decade? Then it becomes more of an optimization problem as opposed to let's just throw things at the wall and see what sticks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:14) As a leader, I'm really curious to know this. Like, right now, it seems like you've got things balanced and you've got a quality of life and you've got that sort of, like, figured out. But you weren't always in the position you are today, right? Like, you've grown a lot. You've founded the company. A lot has happened since 2007 when you first made that application. Did you ever go through the process of, like, overworking and burnout to figure out this is what you have to do?

(John at 00:46:43) It's a wonderful question. The spirit of it is, you know, should there be a separation between work and non-work? And I feel like there shouldn't be. Right? The reason people need downtime and want downtime is because they're not satisfied with what they're doing for the majority of their time. Right? And that's just a shame. And so when I think about, you know, what excites me, it's getting to be at these critical revolutions. Early days, before the iPhone came out, we had smartphones. We had the Windows smartphones, but nobody really got pumped up by those. They had effectively the same features as the early iPhones. They had a web browser. They had a camera. You could text message. They had touch. It wasn't capacitive touch, but they had touch. What happened between the old school smartphone and the iPhone was really the user interface and the interaction design that changed the game. That's what made it real. And so we have the pre-iPhone world and the post-iPhone world. And when I think about right now, we're at another revolution. We have the pre-pandemic world and the post-pandemic world. And in the post-pandemic world, digital is the norm. It's going to become unusual and rare to go to stores, brick and mortar stores, to buy goods. And so what does that mean? And it's this historical point where you really wanna be on the right side of history here.

(John at 00:48:02) And that's what gets me pumped up is making sure the customers we work with are very much on the right side of history.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:08) So people are interested. What's the first step? Do they get a consultation? How does it work?

(John at 00:48:14) Yeah. I think that a lot of times, it will start with a consultation. Normally, there'll be some kind of pressing matter. You know, companies will be working on some type of internal site or they'll need a VR application or they'll—there'll be some type of hardware product with an IoT initiative that isn't doing what it's supposed to. And then they reach out to us and say, hey, do you guys have any expertise on this? And we're happy to jump right in and work immediately and fix that issue. Yes, we'd love to have a broader, longer strategic conversation, but we wanna address the pain immediately that our customers are having. Kind of like when you walk into an ER with, you know, with a broken arm. You want the arm fixed. You don't want to start talking about, you know, high cholesterol or anything. Let's figure that out first, then we can jump on and talk about the longer term health thing. So that's generally how it would work, and we love just having the conversation. I mean, this stuff, it is easy to geek out on. And we've seen just a slew of new people interested in these products that are coming, Apple AirTags being one of them, that it's gonna be a huge game changer. I think it's gonna be more significant than people are betting on right now, even though it's kind of the least sexy of the new products coming out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:20) Those are the tags you can place on things to find where they are?

(John at 00:49:24) Yes. And it seems kind of trivial. You know, it seems like Tile, right? It's like Apple's version of Tile. We actually have the co-founder of Tile works with us at Mutual Mobile, Mick Evans, and we've been very fortunate to hear his kind of perspectives on this. I think what makes it different with Apple doing this is it's kind of like the difference between the Microsoft smartphone and the Apple iPhone. Apple's doing it in a way that will become ubiquitous. We're gonna see this have implications for inventory tracking, right, for luggage on flights. The consumer element is going to be significant. But on the enterprise side, it literally may be the answer to a lot of different connected device problems that people have been struggling to solve for a while.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:06) That's interesting because Apple already has all the sales force and relationships with the enterprise, whereas, like, a Tile would not have that infrastructure in place already.

(John at 00:50:17) Right. And if you think about it, Apple has effectively the world's largest mesh network of these devices. You know, you can tie that into Google and Android too, and you combine those two, you have basically a redundant internet backbone. And being able to locate either via triangulation or sonar or whatever, it's going to mean that you never lose or look for items. Again, we always know where that package is. If your bike gets stolen, we know where it is. You're starting to get—you know, there's talk of other telemetry on these AirTags. So version one may be about where the device is, what the device is. But soon, we can start adding on things into that array, like temperature and motion and a whole slew of other things, so you get almost a health profile for all of your possessions. Could even attach a value to it and know, you know, what your wardrobe is worth. Right? And where—if things are still at the dry cleaners or not. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:08) That's crazy. Because then you could—that's gonna hook into the financial market. Right? Take out a loan against your assets that are all tagged. That's crazy.

(John at 00:51:20) I'm sure there'll be a Black Mirror episode that ties into that as well. But I suspect it'll be more positive than it will be for, you know, for Black Mirror fodder.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:29) What's the Apple headset you were talking about earlier?

(John at 00:51:32) Yeah. This is going to be the most significant event since the smartphone, since the iPhone. So Apple has broken it into kind of two phases. There's two products coming. But before we go into this, let's just talk about why VR didn't work. I mean, like, we all have the Android VR headsets probably in different versions of the Oculus in a closet somewhere. I don't know when the last time you used yours was, but it's been a while for me. Do you have one? Or do you have—

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:59) It's become a home for the dust bunnies. Right?

(John at 00:52:02) Good. They need somewhere, don't they? It's been similar with us. I mean, we've done a lot in VR. We've done—you know, one of the areas where VR is working well in its current days is training. So we've done things for kind of mission critical situations. We got to work with a defense—a company in the defense space. I can't say who it is about how you take spy satellites and you correctly load them onto rockets. It isn't SpaceX. And this was something where people were making mistakes and it was delaying missions and costing a ton of money when you, you know, bend a solar panel or whatever. And so we made a training app for how you get these extremely expensive pieces of equipment into the rocket. We've done things with power plants too. How do you train people to be safe in situations where the stakes are extremely high? VR today works fine for that. The oldest application of where VR works really well that we've done some work on recently is within aviation training, training pilots. You don't want a pilot's first flight to be with passengers in a giant aircraft without that training. Right? So you need to use virtual reality to give those experiences in a cost-effective and safe way. So for high stakes problems, it works extremely well. Where VR has fallen flat is in the lower stakes area where you have a lot of suitable substitutes for either going out in the real world and doing it or reading a Wikipedia page or watching a YouTube video. The cost of putting on the VR set is burdensome. We have to boot it up. You have to calibrate it. It gets too hot. You need to take it off.

(John at 00:53:25) So similarly to why the Windows smartphones never really caught on is where VR is today. The utility isn't worth the headache of using it, even in the social sense. Right? I mean, it would have been a perfect substitute for the pandemic to go in and have entertainment experiences in VR, but it's just the value wasn't there. And so what Apple kind of recognizes, the reason is the interaction. It is very much that paradigm. Right? When you—you don't need to boot up an iPhone, you just turn it on. Whereas a Windows smartphone, you would need to boot it up like a computer. And so Apple's bridged this with two key products. We don't know what the names of them are specifically, but one way to think about it is the first one is going to be largely a VR parenthesis AR product that looks more conventionally like an Oculus headset. And this is going to be having a screen with resolution that you're not supposed to be able to tell you're looking at a screen, which is a pretty big feat. This is going to be a device that you use generally at home. You're not gonna be wearing it out in public. It will be more for probably designers, enterprise settings, entertainment. It won't be a social experience except for the people that you're interacting with through it. It's going to be coming out late 2021. We're gonna be seeing developers having access to it is what we're seeing. This will be something that replaces all of the other historical, I think, VR headsets that are out there. Now that by itself isn't going to bring VR to mainstream or AR to mainstream.

(John at 00:54:52) What Apple has planned for the subsequent year is the glass that everybody's starting to get excited about. We don't know if it's gonna be called Apple Glass or iGlass or Glasses, probably will be. It's everything that Google Glass is not. I was, you know, one of the people that had the Google Glass. I wore it to a South by Southwest talk, and I just realized halfway through while I was wearing it how stupid it was and, you know, took it off because it didn't really provide the utility. It had the same fault the Windows smartphones have. With Apple's version of that, you know they're going to do it right. They're going to make a product that, you know, we can't live without. If you wear glasses or contacts, there's a large percentage chance you're going to be able to have your prescription automatically happen through the glasses using the screens. You won't need to go to an optometrist. You can adjust it. You'll be able to zoom in and zoom out, you know, save memory, use the LiDAR in a really effective way. That's going to usher in this whole new revolution of applications and software very similar to what we saw with the 2009 debut of the App Store, and we're getting all ready for that. We want to be the number one company producing those types of solutions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:58) That's fantastic. I'm like talking to Santa Claus right now. I would like it to be—

(John at 00:56:07) What do you want? Let me know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:08) I want it to be—because I thought a lot about this. Like, what would it take for me to be using this stuff regularly? It would need to be, like, indistinguishable from my sunglasses if it has to be something I put on or more ideally something that just happens in this passive way. Like, it just happens. Right? Like the holo booth things where you're looking at it and it's 3D, but you're not wearing anything. It's just the way that they have set the depth up and the technology, it just looks like there's a person standing in that telephone booth box, but they're just not in the room. But it looks like they're in the room, but there's nothing else special that you're wearing.

(John at 00:56:51) I think that's where we need to get to. There's use cases where people are willing to put up with a bit more of a hassle and knowing that you wear it. We built this application for doctors with Google Glass called Pristine that allowed them during surgical procedures to have the key diagnostics and patient telemetry up on the Google Glass like a HUD and that they could record the procedure. And that provided utility for them and for training. The average person, though, doesn't have that type of mission critical situation. You don't really need to see your Twitter feed, you know, while you're driving. You probably should be paying attention to other cars and, you know, maybe what's on the radio. But once the cost of it, and by cost, I don't mean what you pay for it, but like what you were saying—it feels like sunglasses—gets so low that you might as well, that will be the moment that everybody embraces it.

(John at 00:57:41) Yeah, and it's a pathway to Neuralink, right? These devices are getting more and more intimate, right? We're already having the AirPods in our ears, and we're gonna put something on our face. We have our watch that we wear almost around the clock now for sleep measuring and sleep tracking. The next logical step is to embed them under the skin. And once that happens, we will be computers, right? The line will start to blur, and it will give rise to just unimaginable, I think, positive outcome for humanity from not just from an accessibility standpoint, but also from a quality of life standpoint too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:12) Yeah. When I was thinking of adoption, what was in my head was, like, people wearing them constantly, like, casually. Like, you see people out in public wearing them. I think they would need to be, like, sunglasses style or—that's the context that was in my head because I realized I gave a whole thought, like, without setting it up at all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:31) I was just imagining, like, when I would be in a crowd, who knows if I ever will be again. But when I'll be in a crowd and there will be a bunch of people having adopted it, now it would need to be really light and simple like the sunglasses. But yeah, you know, you're exactly right.

(John at 00:58:47) And the company to do that, I mean, I think that Apple's going to be one of the major players here, but it's not enough just for the idea of that. Like, you think about Kodak. Kodak had the patent on the digital camera, and now they're bankrupt. Right? They had the most significant patents of the 21st century, yet that didn't help them.

(John at 00:59:04) They tried to squash it internally because they realized it would cannibalize film sales. Whereas you had new companies, smartphone companies, Apple, Google, others embrace that and give it away for free, and that's what led to these huge business ideas. So I think we're going to have that same thing happen. The eyeglass industry in the United States, $110 billion industry. Wow.

(John at 00:59:26) All right. That's actually the world. Watches were only $8 billion. So over an order of magnitude bigger. What we see is very, very important, you know, as important as what we hear.

(John at 00:59:37) This is going to become, I think, the new UI for people. You won't need your phone if you have your glasses. And the way that we interact with technology, the way that we interact with the world is going to cross this Rubicon. We're not going to go back to handsets. And the way to get ahead, I think, is to start thinking about what types of products, ideas, solutions we should build now before it launches.

(John at 00:59:59) Because you can be first now. That's what's crazy about this. It's like, imagine I always like to ask the question, you know, if you could go back in time 20 years and you knew everything that you knew now, what would you do if your goal was just to say to have a significant impact on the world and you couldn't change geopolitical events? So let's say, you know, you can't stop September 11th or a pandemic. You know, what would you do?

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:22) Well, if we're talking about, like, finances-wise, speculating on stocks. Oh. Okay. Yeah.

(John at 01:00:27) No, no derivatives or anything like that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:29) I was going to buy some Bitcoin. But the other thing I might do is, you know, register facebook.com and write a short letter to Mark that I want to be business partners.

(John at 01:00:41) I love that idea. I mean, that's a really credible answer. The man behind the man that buying up domain names could be a fascinating way to do that, and you would literally become, you know, definitely a billionaire, maybe a trillionaire by doing things like that. Well, the crazy thing is we have that opportunity again. We're getting it.

(John at 01:00:57) We have, you know, pre-iPhone. We can't go back pre-iPhone, but we can go back pre-Apple Glass. And there's going to be certain inevitability, certain things that we know for sure, product ideas that are going to emerge, companies that are going to start as a result of these two products, the headset and the glasses that Apple are making. And if you start thinking about them right now, and you even start building some of the products, the glasses APK is going to be out very, very soon. So you're going to be able to start, you know, producing these on a simulator probably in six months.

(John at 01:01:29) If we start now, you can have that time machine and do those types of ideas. You may not know the domain name, but you can come up with the product idea.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:36) You're being prepared because we know it's going to happen. It's like the innovation cycles or the cycles of life are speeding up, like, in our lifetime. Mm-hmm. It's getting faster and faster. And so we can see what it's like for the iPhone to come out and then expand over a decade.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:53) And then we can better understand the timeframe for the next new technologies and we can position ourselves. Plus, I mean, I feel like every year I get older, I'm like, I've been waiting for this my whole life. Right?

(John at 01:02:04) When I was—

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:05) If you could have talked to me when I was 13, man, I wanted to be, you know, in my 30s so bad because I wanted to have the ability to just—something changes when you get older. You have more ability to create change.

(John at 01:02:18) Totally. And part of it's situational. Right? I mean, yes, you know more and everything, but also the frequency I think you're alluding to of these new inventions is increasing. Right?

(John at 01:02:27) We used to get a significant major invention maybe every 500 years in the early days of humanity. I don't know how much time transpired between the fire and the wheel or if it was the other way, but probably fire came first, then the wheel. Right? And that was probably a thousand, two thousand, three thousand years. And then we got what?

(John at 01:02:43) The printing press, the radio, the television, then, you know, satellites, internet, computer, iPhone. Like, now we're getting a 500-year innovation every, like, two to three months. It seems like that's the cadence. And so you just pick one of these and you add it into your company, and it's going to have a big result.

(John at 01:03:02) And, you know, the insidious thing though is that if you just kind of wait and see, other companies will start and, you know, they will take your business as a result of it. So I think that's what people need to be mindful of, not just the opportunity, but also the risk of putting too much out there that this new technology product is created if you're not aware how it can help you.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:20) That's why I almost exclusively invest in companies where their founder is still there.

(John at 01:03:26) That's smart.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:27) Because I see what happens when it just becomes run by a board or they just lose their innovation and die off because everyone's scared and trying to manage by degree and no one's having any vision or pulling the people together. And then people mentally check out and start taking a paycheck instead of, you know, living their passion even within the organization. But when you have that spark still at the company, those are the companies that continue to grow and will, you know, overcome new challenges and do great things.

(John at 01:03:56) Totally. And we mentioned Kodak, you know, being one company that's come to that. Blockbuster is another. Right? That was a company that had the chance to buy Netflix.

(John at 01:04:04) They understood the opportunity. They had more than enough resources to go out and build their own internal Netflix, and yet it killed them in a decade.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:15) Well, it's because their executive team was having so much success and in love with basically being real estate agents.

(John at 01:04:22) Yeah. It was moral hazard probably at its finest. Right? They were focusing on the wrong things. They were focusing on the day-to-day rather than the year-to-year. And it's something that you see a lot of, I think, companies mistaking every day.

(John at 01:04:36) And one of the reasons why out of all of the roles at a company, I don't think you can outsource the CTO. I mean, that's the most dangerous role to outsource. You see companies outsource the CFO, CMO, even, you know, private equity shops, sometimes the CEO. But the CTO is making these types of decisions that you really want skin in the game because the company will be forced to live with the decisions made for the rest of its existence. And if they're the wrong decisions, it might be a very short existence.

(John at 01:05:04) So you really want, I think, a CTO that remains at the company for perpetually is probably the best way to say it. Yes, there should be a succession plan, but you don't want to be switching that person every few years. You want someone that you can keep for good.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:19) Right. Or have them groom someone up and move to, like, a board advisor position. But you want to keep them around.

(John at 01:05:25) Yeah. You do want to keep them around, and you want to make sure that, like, if they make the wrong decision, it should affect them personally. And that's one of the things that we always try to do is we try to have skin in the game. When we work with customers, the most fun relationships, yes, you know, we definitely do time, materials, contracts, and those types of SOWs. Ones that get me excited and the ones that have been really successful for us, we did one with Disney like this, is where we have skin in the game, where it's this nonlinear engagement that if we're able to produce more revenue for a given client, we'll share in that.

(John at 01:05:56) In that way, it means that both companies are really well aligned to be able to produce a result. And it's not essential, but at least it means that everybody's on the same page and people respond to incentives and companies are made of people, so you might as well get those incentives right. Just started a new book. I don't know. One of my goals for 2021 is to read at least a book a week.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:19) Oh.

(John at 01:06:20) And so I'm on track so far. Week one. But the book is called Algorithms to Live By. And it's this book written by two computer scientists and their names are eluding me right now. But it basically says, like, let's look at optimization problems within computer science and try to apply them to our own life and our own psychology.

(John at 01:06:40) And it's already been just immensely, I think, relevant. Only about a third of the way through, but, you know, about halfway. And I have one more day to keep that goal. Highly recommend that book.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:51) That is amazing. Yeah. No. I've actually, you're not the first person to recommend that book. I'll take a look at it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:57) I just found out today that we're having this author of—Jake, can you remind me who that was again? Rizwan Virk. And he's like the founder of the MIT Play Labs and stuff. And then he wrote The Simulation Hypothesis. So it's about the simulation hypothesis. So I'm pumped to talk to him.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:18) I want to get really weird with that guy. Right?

(John at 01:07:21) Do you think we're in a simulation?

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:23) I think the argument for the probability that we're in a simulation is a very interesting argument.

(John at 01:07:30) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:31) The base reality argument, right?

(John at 01:07:33) I think you're spot on. Yeah. No. I think you're spot on.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:36) Dude, I like you. I'm really excited. All right. So people want to find out more about Mutual Mobile. If they're interested in getting a quote, speaking to your sales team, how do they go about doing that?

(John at 01:07:47) Yeah. The best way is just go to mutualmobile.com or email me at [email protected] and we'd love just talking about emerging tech and how it can help your business. Let's just have the conversation and see what we can do together.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:02) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.