Don Pawlowski CTO of University Tees

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Don Pawlowski. This guy, oh, man. Talking to him, it felt like we were long lost friends. He is the CTO of University Tees. They are the company, the industry leaders in providing custom t-shirts to college students.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) We talk about hiring the right people, our wives. Michelle, I apologize in advance. I'm so sorry, Michelle. I love you. We talk about machine learning and even cryptocurrency and financial advice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) We are not financial advisors. All this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:00:37) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) This is the Modern CTO podcast. I want to know about your origin story. What got you excited? How did you fall in love with technology?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:00:57) Yeah. Alright. So my goodness. I guess we'll go back to the days of engineering and college and whatnot. So I went to Cleveland State University here in my hometown of Cleveland and didn't really know what else to do. I don't know what major to pick. I just picked engineering. I was good at math and all that kind of good stuff. And ended up in civil and structural engineering, and that was okay. But before I graduated, I knew I didn't want to do it or anything relating to structural or civil engineering.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:01:42) But I graduated like 2009, right around the depths of the recession, and jobs were pretty scarce. And I was getting job offers, and so I figured, you know, I should just take the job, take the money, and get into it, and maybe things will change. Well, things didn't change. Didn't really like the work. I was designing and engineering bridges, specifically. The thing about bridges is that problem has been solved for quite a long time. You know, bridges have been around for a little bit, and physics doesn't change. Yeah. So I began a path. I was trying to get out, try to figure out something different. And, yeah, I also tried to work my way up in some more leadership positions in the industry, but it's such an old line industry that the only way you become leadership is if you've been doing, you know, the groundwork for 20 years. They don't recognize people for leadership skill. They just recognize people for being around for a long time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:44) Wrong, right? Like, is that not the most wrong thing you can do? Oh, you've been—

(Don Pawlowski at 00:02:48) It's awful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:48) Because the longest.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:02:52) It's really, really bad. You know, the guys managing teams in the structural and civil engineering industry don't even want to be managing teams. They were forced into it just because they've been sitting around for so long and they needed to do something else with them to advance their career. So just then, it's just bad. Right?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:03:12) So I started looking around. I mean, it gets to the point where I even was interviewing for a director of purchasing job for a company that sells gas station equipment. Think like the tanks and the lines and the hoses and the pumps.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:33) Super exciting.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:03:34) Exactly. I was literally looking for anything. And then a friend of mine by the name of Kevin Solorio, he basically just said, "Hey, why don't I teach you how to write code?" I'm like, that sounds like a great idea. Part of, you know, one of my classes in college was C++ and I did really well at it, and I liked it.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:03:55) And so we began this journey, if you will, where we'd meet at Panera Bread or something similar every Monday night, and he would essentially give me homework and critique the stuff I did, and I'd buy him a bagel every once in a while. And really more out of just the goodness of his heart, he's a really good guy. He just taught me how to write code, and within, I don't know, two or three months, he had actually announced that he was going to move from Cleveland, and the place he worked, a local consulting shop here, was silly enough to interview me and hire me for a job with only two months of self-taught experience. I ended up doing a little bit of project management stuff for them, but, you know, slowly just started grabbing different projects and coding and just became, you know, more of a full-fledged software developer for them, and just loved it. I mean, the thing that I realized about this technology part versus the engineering part was that it was a different thing and a different challenge and a different puzzle every single day, every single hour.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:05:10) Right? You're coding something. It's a logic puzzle every day that the problem has not been solved. It will not be solved because it's a construct of humans. Right? And so it was just, it just grabbed my attention. I'm very much kind of a guy that needs something new and something different all the time. And to be in this world that is ever-changing and always throwing a curveball at you just really kept me glued into it. And so I guess that's kind of the love affair with technology right there is it just keeps you guessing. It keeps me interested.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:45) Well, variety is the spice of life. Right?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:05:51) Yeah. And it's so bad with me that my wife will tell you, we've had this conversation before where she's like, you know, you're always changing your mind. Are you ever going to change your mind about me? I'm like, no. No. No. You're safe there. We're good here. Everything else, though, is like, I've got to change it up every once in a while and try something different.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:13) You passed up on the opportunity. You could have kept her on her toes.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:06:16) Right. Yeah. Well, you know, check something in a year or two. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:21) We're working on a new build. It's in the pipeline. No. I love it. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:27) My wife brings stuff similar to that up to me all the time. She's like, you're always moving. You're always, you know, so fast. You go from project to project to project. And I was like, you know what? If I was working a nine to five on one long-term project, I would have to find the variety within that project to do different things and to scale and to keep it interesting. Otherwise, I would die. I always have to be, I'm like, I love learning. I love learning new things and putting it to practice and growing as a person. So software is the place to do that. Right?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:07:02) Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, you have to. Right? If you don't learn, you die. Actually. Truthfully in this environment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:09) So I want to get a little bit, great introduction overview of who you are and your origin story. As a, so you're a CTO now. Right?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:07:21) Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:22) Okay. Excellent. And that is what company?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:07:25) University Tees.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:27) Excellent. In t-shirts. Beautiful. You're making the t-shirts. Tell me a little bit more about, so you make t-shirts, sell t-shirts.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:07:35) Yeah. So the company was started, you know, a little over a decade ago, and the problem they were solving was awful customer service with custom apparel for sororities and fraternities. So the two co-founders were in a business fraternity, and they just needed shirts for some event they were holding, and the local mom and pop shops, just the service was awful. There was one person who did it, and they treated their customers like crap, and they saw an opportunity. And so they started, you know, selling their own, not apparel, but the designs for the apparel. Everything we do is custom. Every single order that we receive is a custom order, which has its own very unique challenges. And so they, it took off. They were at Miami University in Ohio, and it took off and they started hiring their friends at other campuses to go out and find these sororities and fraternities that needed custom apparel. And they outsourced a lot of the actual decorating of the apparel to, you know, shops that existed in, about I think it was six or seven years ago now, started their own print shop.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:08:50) And so not only do we go out and sell the work and we do the artwork, we also print the shirts, screen printing, embroidery, all that stuff in-house now too. We obviously still outsource things. We can't do all the work ourselves. But it's solely around selling custom shirts to sorority girls, really. And that's a, they spend a lot of money on it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:13) Yeah. And—

(Don Pawlowski at 00:09:14) Like, a lot of money.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:16) Yeah. Trust me. My house, I'm fighting my wife on the decorations. It's like, I'm not kidding you. This week, I literally said, she was buying some decorations, and I was like, you know, that's about $300 in decorations right there that came through on Amazon. Right? Tell me about it. That's what I was like. Yeah. You know, and I instantly said to her, I go, do you know how many Facebook ads that is? I could reach 7,000 people. I could help 7,000 people learn and get more information and, but no, we have garland. We have lit garland.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:09:56) Well, you know, you want the banister to look nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:00) Of course. It's essential. It's essential. Okay. A couple things. So I'm actually poking around on your site while we talk. Okay?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:10:09) Okay. Cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:10) And I like the bird. Okay?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:10:14) Yeah. The bird's great. Bruno. We call him Bruno.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:16) Bruno. Bruno the bird. It's got the alliteration and everything. Right? The designs are super modern, and your photography is on point. Right? So you're responsible ultimately. You're the CTO of the company. You're responsible for the website. I love how you went with the clean look. And I know it sounds a little bit geeky, but when I see those drop-downs, I genuinely appreciate the drop-downs. They're good. They're really good. Nothing bothers me more than a poorly designed drop-down or a drop-down that isn't solid functioning, you know, one that feels really good.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:10:56) Sure. I can't take all the credit for that. We got a really solid team. Designers, our marketing team is amazing to work with. Our chief creative officer is just a phenomenal guy. He's got a lot of talent. And, you know, our senior UX and front-end developer just, I mean, he really understands the work, and he takes a tremendous amount of pride in his craft. And so, really, all I did was hire him and get out of his way. So I can't take a lot of credit for that site.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:26) No. You're, that is, we were talking about that on the show this week with a gentleman who has a gaming company and they have about three to 400 employees and they make tons of mobile games. Right? Large company. And we were talking about the whole, you know, Steve Jobs and many other great leaders have said this or something similar that you hire people who are smarter than you and you let them tell you what to do. You resource them. Right?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:11:50) Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, this comes up often on my team. It's, you know, as long as I take care of the team and I hire the right people and I make sure they're a good culture fit, there's the things I look for when I'm hiring someone is, are they a motivated individual? Are they a nice person? And do they have the ability to learn? If I nail those three things, then the work gets done for free, truthfully. And all I have to do is concentrate on the people. And so if you make that happen, then beautiful websites like the one you're looking at, they just happen for free, truthfully.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:29) No. You're so, I had made tons of mistakes in my career. Right? That's how you, right. It's basically I've got a lot of, if somebody says they have a lot of experience, they say, you know, I screwed up a lot and I learned from it. Right? So when I found, and it was, it was magical when I had the moment. But when I found that if I hire better people and spend more money and make less money on margin, when the specific context is making apps on contract. Right?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:13:02) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:02) If I give up that margin and instead charge the amount that I can hire the best possible people, my life becomes amazingly simple. Sure. The best designers, the best developers, the best testers, put them all together in a room and pay them the rate that they need to care enough to do the quality job and that they're motivated. And they just, they do the project. They do the project. It's amazing, and it comes out great. So, yeah.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:13:35) Yeah. I can't stress it enough. I mean, the people is where it's at.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:39) So I have a couple more questions for you. You have a math background. Right? You enjoyed it and were good at it. Have you taken a look at any of the machine learning type technologies out there?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:13:52) A little bit. It's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:53) A tiny bit.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:13:55) Yeah. It's not, I haven't devoted the amount of time that I should have to it. But we do have some potential really strong use cases for it. And we have a lot of images, a lot of images. Again, we're custom apparel. Every order we do is custom. So we get a college kid coming in saying, "I want this t-shirt for whatever." They shoot us over an image. And then our art team, you know, turns that into something, and then they shoot it back. And then there's a revision, and then someone has another idea.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:14:27) And so we have tons of images. And the problem that we have right now as a company is we aren't using those images like we should be. We don't know where those images are. We can't find those images easily. You know, we could start tagging images, but, you know, that's an extra process that the art team has, you know, each artist has to undertake and, you know, they're creative people. They don't want to worry about administrative tagging of stuff. They just want to create art. Right? And so, right. We've started very basically looking into these machine learning or things like, I think Amazon has something called Recognition or whatever. Basically, reading these images and tagging them for us so we can use them in-house. The problem, the thing I'm finding in, it's the place where I have to spend more time in learning about is a lot of that works really great for photos, not necessarily illustrations. And so I'm curious to see, you know, I've got to get more into the weeds with that to see what's really going on with that. It's super intriguing to me, and I think there's a tremendous opportunity to get into, to, you know, utilize those technologies. But admittedly, I am pretty barren in it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:39) Excellent. That's honesty, and that's what we go for. Right? So, so I found that, you know, the, that quality, I'm going to take a second to reflect back on it. That is an undervalued quality that when I find people with it, I love to tag them as experts because the person that is intelligent and can tell you, "Look, I know a little bit about it. We played a little about it, but I really don't know about it." That person's, nine times out of 10 in my experience, a great person. The person to watch out for is when you bring up 20 different topics and they're an expert on all of them. It's like—

(Don Pawlowski at 00:16:18) Oh, sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:18) Right? So that's the person—

(Don Pawlowski at 00:16:20) Not a thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:21)
Yeah, so I actually played a little bit. I have almost no experience with it as well, but I did play a little bit with it, and it looked like that service you were talking about—like you said, it's great for recognizing objects in images. So when I'm looking on your site right now, it's like every object would be like typography, typography. Right? Every photo would be tagged with typography.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:43)
Right, every photo would be tagged with typography.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:16:47)
Yeah, great. Thanks. We weren't aware of that yet, right?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:16:51)
Yeah, no, that's right. And so that's kind of like—I want to be—I would love to find the service that helps us identify, you know, the image that has like the little pumpkin in it for some kind of Halloween party they did, or, you know, the dog for whatever. You know, all those kinds of little characteristics that show up in illustration for whatever reason. At least when I checked—again, I haven't gotten into it in about a year since the last time I really looked at what was available—but that would be a game changer if we could implement stuff like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:25)
Yeah, I did see when Halloween time came out, there was one of the guys that's apparently a personality inside of machine learning. He did a blog post that was shared several thousand times, and he actually had the machine learning system draw mashup costumes, like sketches of different popular Halloween costumes. And you could go check that out and Google around for that after the call. But it was kind of cool to see the machine like learn to draw and then draw some costumes, and some of them were pretty comical. 80% is probably useless, but sure, the 20% that came out were kind of, you know, it's like watching a little baby walk. It's like, cool for a second. It's like, all right, great.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:18:05)
Yeah. Spooky. Well, I just—I didn't mean to say spooky. That was a pun, I guess. Weird.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:12)
I'll put a rim shot in over editing. You'll see.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:18:15)
Oh, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:16)
All right. I got your back, Don. I'm Team Don here.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:18:22)
Oh, man. You know, that's my team's fault. There's so much punning going on on a daily basis around my team, it's just starting to rub off on me, which is unfortunate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:30)
Right. Are you a dad?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:18:33)
I am a dad of two.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:35)
Oh, I'm a dad of one right now. Eleven weeks old.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:18:39)
Congratulations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:40)
Thank you. So, wow, you know how much sleep I have?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:18:44)
Yeah, sleep's a luxury, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:47)
Yeah, I noticed the dad jokes started kicking up the moment my wife had the baby.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:18:53)
It's amazing, isn't it? Right. It's just, it's all in us. It's just waiting for that trigger.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:00)
Exactly. So all right, here's a good one for you. I want to know—the problem you described, you're an engineer, right? Design problems, we solve problems. It's what we do. You know? And you were mentioning that there's a lot of back and forth between the customer and the design team and that whole flow, the core of your business. Did you roll something of your own to handle that process, or did you leverage another technology?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:19:22)
Everything we have is hand-rolled, essentially. Everything. So, and I've looked at other ERPs that could run our systems. We've done trials with things like Shopify. We've tested different platforms, and they just don't work because of the custom nature of our business. They weren't meant for it, right? They're meant to sell that same black t-shirt with the same white lettering, Cleveland or Nowhere stuff every time, and the variations are large and extra large and whatever. But so everything we have is hand-rolled. And so, you know, the interaction with the customer—we are the main person using our applications. We have two main applications and then a couple little websites like uts.com, where you're checking out. Our campus managers, college kids—they're contractors—they kind of go out and find work and whatever, and find these organizations that are looking for custom apparel. They interact with our application by, you know, uploading an image, chatting with the art team. We have like a little state machine that's like art uploaded, art requested, art revision requested, those kinds of things. And they use that to get the artwork nailed down. And then, you know, they go to a checkout phase where we're using Braintree to collect credit card information, and that goes on to our operations team where it gets approved and scheduled. And then we actually purchase the apparel from whatever, you know, like American Apparel or Gildan or some of those bigger brands.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:10)
How are they doing, by the way? How is American—are they still around, American Apparel?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:21:14)
Yeah, well, they were bought by Gildan, which is—that's not like a name you would recognize if you're not like in the industry, I suppose. But Gildan is probably one of the biggest apparel manufacturers, if not the biggest, I think. They bought American Apparel recently, and I'm not sure where it got left off, but it may not be so American-made anymore. I think they might try to have a specific American-made brand or product line within that. But we're actually kind of hopeful about it because when Gildan gets its hands on something, it tends to make it better, at least as far as like stock is concerned. Stock—getting our hands on the apparel that our customers want—ends up being a bigger problem than you might expect. And so we kind of get excited when someone's going to say they're going to actually improve the availability and the stock of an item.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:16)
Oh, no. You know what? I had about six or seven months ago, we had this app launching. It was a fitness-related app, right, we built for a customer. And one of their ways to get the word out was they printed up a bunch of the really nice, you know, like the nice gym shirts that like feel really good, like the Under Armour-type ones. So they wanted to get a bunch of those printed up with their logo on it and then go hand them out for free at gyms. And I was just blown away by the difficulty of this process that I figured had been so simple and modernized by, you know, today, this day, right?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:22:51)
Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:51)
And it was like pulling teeth. And so, like, I'm not a fan of ordering t-shirts. I don't know if that's something anyone's a fan of, but the opportunity was like blinding. And it looks like you guys have just taken all the stress out of it in the university context, right?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:23:15)
We're trying. I mean, there's still a lot of room for improvement, which is, you know, the exciting part, which if nothing more is, you know, job security for myself. But there's a lot of cool problems that we can solve yet, that my team can solve together. And you could almost, like, you could almost just close your eyes and spin around and point at some place in one of our offices, and you'll stumble upon something that you can deliver $100,000 or $200,000 or $500,000 of return on investment on pretty easily. The runway is so wide and so long right now, and that's really the exciting time around here. We're doing a great job, but there's so many things we can do better. And a lot of that is through technology and solving problems and thinking about it differently, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:06)
Yeah. How large is the company? Like, how many—I know you said you do some stuff with some freelance graphic artist people, right? Or at least that's the way I took it. But I'm sure you have like internal designers and everything internal as well. But how large is your internal team?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:24:23)
So we have, if you count the print shop, you know, we have somewhere around 160, 180 employees, team members, at any given moment. And the majority of that is in the print shop. We try to—I think we print somewhere around 70% of the orders we take in right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:41)
Oh, that's fantastic.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:24:44)
Yeah, yeah. And we're, you know, we're always expanding. We're trying to always expand the print shop, being conscious of like seasonality. We have some pretty strong seasonality in the fall and the spring, our peak seasons. And so we have to staff up big time for those areas because, you know, kids coming back or starting their new semester or whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:06)
And rush is like the time.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:25:08)
Exactly. It's like, yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:10)
And that's when you've got to have the shirts. You've got to have the shirts at rush, so...

(Don Pawlowski at 00:25:14)
I mean, that's our biggest—that's our biggest time in getting into sororities and fraternities and making sure, you know, we—and we try to get, you know, we're starting on those orders early in the summer, just making sure they're ready to go, trying to meet that demand.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:29)
Here's the problem I'm facing. Okay? So these podcasts are going great. We've just been recording them back to back. We got 30 scheduled, right?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:25:37)
Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:37)
Yeah. The next two months are just booked solid. And we have all awesome CTOs like you. And we have this big editing queue that's going to happen with editing the audio and chopping it up. And you would be a good person to ask. So we have three or four people that we've interviewed and talked to for editing the audio, and they each seem to have, you know, two or three different softwares that they use, like ones that they really like, right? And so for graphics, you would have, you know, your Photoshop, your Illustrator, your Sketch. I don't know if they use Sketch, but we do in our teams for designing. So how do you deal with the different people wanting to use a different software and your assets being compatible for people to rip stuff out of?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:26:25)
Yeah, so it's a good question. It actually hasn't been too big of a deal on the art team side. The one thing, you know, early on in the company—it's one thing a lot of people get all bent out of shape about, like especially big corporations, like the bring-your-own-device crowd, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:42)
Right.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:26:43)
Bring-your-own-software crowd. At some point, you have to standardize for productivity's sake. I'm not sure how the art team used to operate, but as far as, you know, for the last three years that I've been here, they pretty much all use the exact same tooling. And I don't know that they would let someone use something different because especially, you know, you're not the only artist that is going to touch a piece of art before the order goes out. Someone else may come in and do a revision for you. It depends on who's got what in the queue and when it comes in and when the customer needs it and that kind of stuff. So having consistency across the tools that are being used is important for us because, you know, our art team is probably our bottleneck right now. Right? We do so much art that we have to focus on efficiency of that team. And not only are we putting technology into it, you know, we're putting, you know, lean manufacturing processes around that team and testing stuff all the time to make it as functional as possible. And so having consistent tooling is a really big part of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:54)
Fantastic. I'm going to change the conversation a little bit because I want your opinion on a couple things that I've been talking about this week. I want to know what your thoughts are on cryptocurrency as a whole, and you can touch any part of it that you want.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:28:11)
Oh, man. It's amazing what like a dramatic increase in a price target will do to the freaking world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:20)
It set it on fire.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:28:26)
So my sister, who, you know, obviously I love very much, her and her husband, and I love him very much—they brought up, you know, the concept of cryptocurrency to me a couple months ago. And, you know, it's—I guess it's just because, like, oh, well, like, you're a tech dude, so you probably know something about this crypto thing. And I guess I know a little bit. I don't know a lot at all. And so, like, well, do you think we should invest? And I'm like, whoa, I mean, what do you—like, I don't even know how to—I mean, like, I feel like it's—I don't know. It was so volatile then. This is over the summer, right? We're talking like swings between a couple hundred dollars and, you know, maybe like a thousand or two. I don't even remember. I'm like, well, you know, wait for the next big dip. Right? Well, sure enough, it hits 14 or 15,000. She's texting me. She's like, I guess we missed it. And I'm like, maybe not. I mean, probably not, right? Like...

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:26)
It's such a horrible spot to be in.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:29:29)
It just comes out of nowhere. She like swoops in. She's like, hey, crypto. Did we—we didn't do it good. I'm like, I don't know. And then, you know, I got a buddy of mine who just—he just bought a few a while ago because, you know, for shits and giggles, more or less.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:45)
Right.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:29:46)
Yeah. I'm sitting on a bunch of cash right now. He's like, I'm kind of scared. What do I do with this? I was like, dude, I don't know. This is uncharted territory for pretty much literally everyone. I don't know. I feel like it's got to come back down, right? Like, all these people can make some money. Standard market economics says like there'll be a crash at some point. And maybe not a big crash, but like the stock market goes up and down every couple years. Like, I'm sure Bitcoin's going to go up and down every couple years, but like...

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:15)
Well, it's, I don't know...

(Don Pawlowski at 00:30:17)
Who knows, right? It's a complete, like, fabrication.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:21)
Yeah. Like, here's the thing. So you have the concept of like value, right? But then you also have like the human component where we decide—we're humans. We decide the value together. So you could take anything regardless of what its like value is, and you can artificially inflate it, like, you know, like the tulips in the eighteen hundreds or nineteen hundreds or whatever.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:30:45)
Yeah. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:46)
And then when everyone decides it's not valuable, they exit. So for me, the human part of it is the thing that sends my spidey senses tingling with it going up, because everyone's like, oh, man, yeah, it's so exciting. I'm getting 20% or 100% a week. It's growing at 100% a week. It's like, it's crazy, and it's going up, up, up. And I'm like, eventually someone's going to be like, all right, I'm good. Like, it's got—I'm going to start taking my money out. And then the price will sort of like, you know, level off. And then everyone's like, well, this isn't exciting anymore. I was getting 100%. Now it's been flat for three months. Screw it. Let's pull my million dollars out. And then that's when you get the roller coaster, like, down effect, right? Where it's like, oh, man.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:31:32)
See, I guess—so the people who've asked me, and again, I don't know why they're asking me. I'm not an expert. I don't have any Bitcoin. I don't really know much about it. Again, because I'm a tech guy, apparently I know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:42)
Well, you're not—we need to make it very clear that neither Joel nor Don have passed any sort of financial certification.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:31:53)
Yeah. We do not have your best interest in mind.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:55) We are not financial advisors. There we go. That's the SEC compliance, so we're good. We're good.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:32:01) Right. So now we can say where the heck we're going. Yeah. I guess people have asked me, I'm saying if you haven't sold a little bit to at least recoup your initial investment, you're stupid. At least take a little off the table. You want to let the rest go for the ride because you think it's gonna go to $30,000 or $40,000 or whatever the heck? More power to you, man. But I don't know. I used to watch Jim Cramer a lot, the CNBC guy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:27) Oh, I love him. I need the buttons on my show.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:32:30) Yes, you do need the buttons on your show.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:32) Feature creep, feature creep, feature creep. Right?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:32:35) Yep. That would, I mean, that would probably send you to the top of the charts, I would have to imagine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:41) Yeah, yeah, of course.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:32:43) But, you know, he always had a saying that bulls make money, bears make money, and hogs get slaughtered. So I feel like if you're being a pig and just waiting for it to go higher, you're gonna get slaughtered. So I don't know. Sell some Bitcoin and go buy a fancy dinner or something. I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:59) Yeah. I had a guy who called me up, and he said, I made a ton of money off Bitcoin, and I would like you to develop my own exchange. Because I want to take my money from Bitcoin and develop my own exchange. He had made more than a few million dollars in Bitcoin. Right? And so he goes, you know, how much would it cost if you're going down that path? And so then he sends me another message later. He's like, oh yeah, we want to move forward. And he says, you know, should I just hold my Bitcoin? It's going up, up, up, up, up. And then he asked me this amazing question that everybody does when they want information. What would you do? Right? And then they're gonna hold you to that as if it was your professional opinion. So I told him this. I said, here's what I do. If I had made a bunch of money and I wanted to invest and let some of it ride, I'd pull some of it out, and I'd buy a cabin in the mountains because I want a vacation home in the mountains. I love going up there. And I would call that my Bitcoin cabin. And no matter what happened in life, whether it went up or it went down to zero, I would always be able to say, hey, I went into that Bitcoin thing, and I put in, you know, $10,000, and I got my vacation spot. I got my peace spot. I got my Bitcoin spot. It's my Bitcoin cabin. And I would just be totally okay with it. It's similar to what you're saying.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:34:19) Sound advice. Yeah. I like it. Yeah. Just take a little bit off the table and do something for yourself. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:25) And then there's no regret, you know?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:34:26) And if you haven't bought Bitcoin yet, wait for the dip. I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:32) Wait for the dip. That's the Modern CTO Podcast. Our official position on Bitcoin is wait for the dip.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:34:41) A lot of things probably too. Just wait for the dip. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:45) Alright. Alright. So virtual reality, consumer behavior, virtual reality. Do you know anyone today that spends an hour in virtual reality? No. Me either, man. I don't know. Been around since the eighties. Always getting better. I mean, I don't see the—

(Don Pawlowski at 00:35:03) But it hasn't caught hold yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:04) No. It's, like, 20 years. I think it'll be 20 years in the future. We'll be there. That's been one of the least predictable things to me. Right?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:35:17) I'm just waiting for the people who create the warehouses, and you can put on some VR thing and you can run around doing, you know, God knows what, pretending you're in a paintball game or something. That sounds like fun. When that happens, I'll be into the VR stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:34) Well, Don—

(Don Pawlowski at 00:35:34) I know it has happened to some degree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:36) I'm gonna make your Friday, Don.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:35:39) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:39) Those exist.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:35:41) Is there one by me?

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:44) Is there one by you? I don't know.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:35:46) That's what I mean.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:47) I think there's one in Orlando, and it's really cool because they—I'm down in Florida—so they had a video I saw online where they hang materials in the room. So as you're actually walking through the room, you feel the materials and—

(Don Pawlowski at 00:36:02) Yeah, yeah. I like that. See, that might be cool. But, you know, I guess if laser tag was a thing at some point, right, these could be a thing for people buying storefronts. And I guess that's what they'll do with all the empty Best Buy stores and all that. It's like your virtual reality whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:22) Brought to you by Amazon, putting everyone else out of the picture.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:36:29) Amazon VR Adventure, we'll call it. No. Actually, that would be too literal. If you're naming things and you're from Amazon, you have to make it super obscure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:36) Oh, of course. Right. Web browsers. Yeah. Have you—there's a book that follows Jeff Bezos's life story, and I listened to it on Audible. And they go through the whole—they skipped his parents having sex. They skipped that part. But they started with him being born. And they went through his whole childhood, and they came all the way up through Amazon. I think the book, like, four years ago ended. Right? So you've got some inside information on the development of Amazon as recent as four years. And that blew my mind, hearing all those little details about how he handled each of the different situations with Amazon and how they negotiated and bought other businesses out and how they grew the Amazon market share and put other businesses out of business. Have you come across that book?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:37:31) I have not. It sounds like I should probably give that a read, though.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:34) Oh, yeah. He goes in, and you can get a real good feel for how he makes decisions. And he's very minimalist. Right? So you can go through how he makes decisions and how they acquire companies and how they basically put everyone else out of business. And it's no surprise to me that in the past, what, four months, he became one of the wealthiest people on earth. I think he passed Bill Gates for number one.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:37:59) Yeah. That would be interesting. I just got off the Elon Musk biography.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:04) Love it.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:38:05) And loved it. So I can imagine I would like this one just as much. It's just interesting, especially a guy like Elon who, I mean, you know, is the one who's using technology to change the world and not bring us Snapchat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:22) No. I love it. Man, so I've read that book as well. Right? And how awesome—well, first of all, he's an awesome person. Right? I'm a fan. I like him. I liked him after reading his story. I didn't know him before. You feel like you know someone when you read their story. Right? South Africa, Canada, States, you know, his whole different companies and how he lived in his office with his brother and showered across the street at the YMCA or whatever. All that good stuff. So I always look at him when I have a business because he perfectly characterizes being a minimalistic startup. But he also—man, did he push it. Right? How many times did every one of his businesses almost go out of business?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:39:07) Yeah. He's talking about—man. Couldn't do it. I couldn't do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:12) No. I'm too risk-averse for that kind of stuff, you know.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:39:14) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:16) Me too. I say I'm risk-averse, but I'll take a risk, but it's a risk that I can—like, everyone has a different word for risk. Right? They have a different way that they feel about it. Some people put everything in. Like, oh, I'm gonna go 100% in on black. Right? And roll the dice. Right? But for me, I'll take a risk that I'm okay losing. That's how much risk I'll put up. Right? So you gotta mitigate. It's like hedging. Right?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:39:50) Right. Makes it even more interesting with a young kid, I'm sure. Does that change your calculus a little bit?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:55) It changed my budget.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:39:59) It changed—oh, dude. Wait 'til daycare starts. Oh, no. It's not good. It's really not good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:06) We're actually broadcasting from our office that we just moved into about this week.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:40:14) Yeah. Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:15) So I had—I like that. Yeah. We have about 10 people at my app company. Right? And, okay, but we're all experts, and they all work from either shared co-working spaces or their houses, and they're great. Like, hire the best people. Right? And when I had the kid, my lovely child, I had to get out of the house. So I got an office. And plus, and then that's how this whole Modern CTO thing happened. I was like, well, I got the office, and we have our app thing. Like, I don't know if you know about what I do, but I work with investors, and they inject capital into companies, and we usually build technology. So I don't do a lot of public work where people just come to my company and are like, hey, we want an app. It's usually just through friends, you know, relationships. So I'm not struggling to market or grow it. Like, I kind of like where it's at. And I wanted to help the—I don't know about you, but for me, I was a self-taught developer, and my dad was a programmer. He'd take me to work with him. And I spent a lot of energy and effort learning and a lot of head-banging against the keyboard-type situations. Everything from, like, learning programming, figuring it out, through my first couple deals and, you know, selling them in the whole finance. And you have to learn about seeds and investors and all about that all the way through management and scaling and getting people in the dynamics of making people feel heard and all the people part of it. Right? So I struggled through all of that. And then my goal with this Modern CTO was, well, why don't I put it all into a book and then push it out there as far and wide as possible and get the information out. Right? So that the 13-year-old version of me could come across this book and read it and just have a little bit better chance. Just avoid a few of the mistakes that I made. Right?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:42:20) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:21) So I want you to give me some advice that you would give your previous self to avoid some mistakes.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:42:30) Oh, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:30) Yeah. I know. It's real. This is now real talk on the Modern CTO.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:42:35) This is real talk. This is, like, put-me-on-the-spot kind of talk. Alright. So advice that I would give—

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:44) Elon Musk creates a time machine, and he says, hey, Don, I'll do that over here. My time machine business is almost going out of business. I've gotta try to get NASA to help save us, but it might not be possible. So I want you to come over here and use the time machine real quick. And it can only go back to 10 years ago, and you can only talk to your previous self. Like, what would you say?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:43:12) Oh, man. Alright. So what are my parameters here? Do I gotta keep it tech-related? Gotta keep it—

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:18) No, life-related.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:43:19) Anything at all right now, you'd walk through a time machine, you see yourself 10 years ago, what do you do?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:43:26) Oh, man. Well, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is don't break up with my wife the first time we did that. That was really stupid.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:40) Oh my god. That's so good. So good. Done.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:43:41) Still the dumbest thing I've done. My mom told me. I didn't believe her.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:46) If only I had the Jim Cramer soundboard. Right?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:43:51) Tony, you gotta get it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:52) I gotta get it. Done. Next piece.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:43:58) Next piece of advice. Oh, man. Well, you know, there's so many possible things, I guess. You know, I mentioned earlier that I'm a pretty risk-averse guy, but, I mean, that has done—it's done well for me, but there's definitely opportunities that I've probably passed up on because of that, not taking the right risk. You know, you put it a good way, like, risk as much as you're willing to lose. And for me, I wasn't—I'm not often willing to lose really anything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:38) So you're a pretty content person?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:44:40) I honestly am. It's weird. And I'm not infallible. And I'm definitely not, like, I don't have all the answers for sure. But this is honestly, like, a really hard question for me to answer. And because I feel like I feel pretty good about, you know, where I've been and where I've gone to and how things have shaped up in the last 10 years. You know, when I do make a decision, because I am a risk-averse person, I spend a ton of time making that decision. Like, here's an example. When I was trying to pick out a backpacking stove, I spent two full days reading reviews on REI.com and talking to people before I decided to make that $40 purchase. Now if you calculate the amount of hours that went into that and, you know, assign me an hourly rate, that wasn't a great investment, but I still did it. And so I think that served me well with all the other decisions I made. Because I feel like, you know, I've got a great job. I've got a great team. I've got a great family. I've got a great house. And, you know, I think I've done pretty okay. I mean, there's definitely, like, there's some things I would have liked to have learned sooner, you know. A lot of different books that I've been reading lately, you know, have been—would have been nice to read those 10 years ago and maybe would have accelerated some different things for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:14) Including the Musk book?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:46:17) Including the Musk book. Sure. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:20) Yeah. Because I would have used if I go back in time and do the Musk book, then I would have just leveraged that stock-wise when he was almost out of money. Right? I would have been like, oh, you want to do a deal? You know? Let's—

(Don Pawlowski at 00:46:32) Yeah. Actually, okay. Here it is. I got it, Don. I got it. I would have bought Bitcoin.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:38) Oh, snap. I mean, there's people that are listening—I didn't even pick up on this—they're like, whatever. But there's people that are listening that are screaming at the speaker, like, buy Bitcoin. Right?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:46:48) Right. Full circle. Yeah. We just brought it back around. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:52) Done. Excellent. Yeah. That sounds like a great spot to end, I guess. I mean, this is definitely an amazing conversation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:02) You know, I had one guy yesterday, very, very cool guy, excellent conversation like you, right? And he was so fast when I asked him that question. I said, you know, advice you would give yourself? He goes, oh, he goes, you're always right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:17) That's his advice. Like, he said to himself, he's like, don't worry, you're always right. And I was like, wow, dude. Like, I want to be you because I am not. I am wrong a lot, right?

(Don Pawlowski at 00:47:33) You know, the fun thing that's going to happen is I'm going to—this question is going to eat at me for the next couple days, and I'll come up with a good answer. I'll make sure I send that over to you. But, yeah, I have time. I can't—like, this one's going to eat me for a while.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:46) No worries. I did not—by the way, that was—thanks for the number. That was not the—yeah. Let's screw this guy. I was talking to Jake before the call.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:47:53) I was—

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:54) I was like, let's drop this bomb right at the end, just walk away and be like, see you. And he's just going to start crying in his office.

(Don Pawlowski at 00:48:01) Yeah. You need the mic drop sound right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:03) Boom. Mic drop. Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO Podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.