The Leader's Mindset Ep. 6: Building RECORD (Full Episode)

Welcome to the Leaders Mindset where we have illuminating conversations with leaders making an impact in their companies, their families, their communities, and how they build those teams around them they need to make that real impact in the world. Today we've got a great guest. He grew up right here in Las Vegas. He's founded multiple businesses which we're going to get into all of that including a co-working space and a multi-million dollar marketing agency and now he's tackling the tech space and he's a CEO and founder of Record. He's also shaping the next generation of entrepreneurs as an adjunct professor at UNLV. Please welcome Kenny Eliason. Hey, what's up? Hey. Tell us about Record. What is it? Why did you start it? What are we doing here? Man, that's a loaded question. There's a lot that went into Record. Record right now is a tool for personal injury attorneys to connect better with their clients. So it's actually an app for the client of a personal injury attorney that they use to facilitate data transferring and communications back to their attorneys. The goal is that clients are more satisfied, cases are higher quality, and settlements actually increased because of both of those things. And when clients are happy and they make more money, they tend to refer more clients, which means more happy clients and more money on top of that. So that's what we're building right now. Yeah, because what's the challenge with the clients, right? There's a challenge. Yeah. Every client is usually their first time being in a car accident. And so usually they have no idea what they're doing. And so a lot of an attorney's day is spent educating a client and telling them what they're doing and what they should be doing and why they're doing it. And so we're offloading a lot of that education and that training to the app, which hopefully increases compliancy with the clients. They're more willing to do. It's like you don't like doing anything. You don't know why you're doing it. Clients are the same way. I mean, they're just humans like you and I. So we're giving them that why and that helps increase compliancy so that they do the things that they're supposed to do. That's fantastic. Great customer experience is going to help the clients be better clients for the attorneys. It's going to help the attorneys do a better job, getting them a better settlement. Yeah, exactly. Win-win for everybody. Yeah, exactly. It goes back to my time. I worked at a personal injury law firm for a long time and I was a legal assistant. I speak Spanish. So they hired me only because I spoke Spanish, not because I knew how to do anything with law. I actually did not want to do anything with law and just fell into the job because I needed a job. Ended up loving it and the main thing I loved about the job was helping the people. Like especially in the Hispanic market, this is way different to the stuff that they're used to. So I was a really important part of their case and I developed friendships and relationships with these people that I still have friendships with to this day, 20 years later almost. And so taking that same love for the people and now being able to digitize it and make it into a tech solution is the real reason why we're doing it. But you went through a long gap of time between working in that law firm and starting record. So what led up to starting record and what was the catalyst that made you pull the trigger on starting a tech startup? Okay. So brace yourself. It starts way back in 2004 when I got that job. I didn't want to, didn't think I'd love it, ended up loving it. For about an eight year span, I did pretty much every job imaginable inside the law firm. I went from being just a legal assistant to a paralegal to office manager to office manager over two offices to even at the, towards the end, I was actually representing clients at hearings for work comp cases that you didn't have to be an attorney for. So I was a hearing advocate for some of these clients. So I did everything inside the law firm and I became really, really close friends with the attorneys. And again, like I started off saying, I had never, ever wanted to do anything with law. That was not on my radar until one day I'm sitting in a meeting with the attorneys and I got wind of how much money they made every month. And I said, yeah, maybe I'll be an attorney. That doesn't sound like a bad job. So I signed up for law school. I did the LSAT, you know, my family, I mean, we're, my dad was a carpet layer my whole life, you know, like we don't do secondary education, let alone professional degrees. And so I had graduated from UNLV with a degree in Spanish by that point and decided to go to law school. So did the whole thing. Some of the parts I wish I would have learned, well, I learned a bunch about how law schools function. Unfortunately, I learned them in the wrong way. But we didn't know any better. I didn't know any better. I was choosing schools. I think a lot of attorneys would agree with you on that. It's surprising. It's surprising. Yes. Many, when, when I finished the story, many people are like, oh, you got lucky. So I get accepted to like five different schools around the country. I go in and visit all the schools. And, and liked a lot of them ended up picking California Western down in San Diego, for a number of reasons, proximity, easy to come back on the weekends, a lot of different reasons. So pick that school. I didn't know much more about the school than they taught law, like every other law school did. So I go through my first year of law school, and I get to the end of my first year, and I rolled right into the summer semester because I was going to do it in two and a half years instead of three years. So I'm halfway through my summer semester when grades come out for the first semester, for the first year. And I learned an important thing about law school at that point. And that is that every law school, every law school, not just my law school, every law school cuts a bottom percentage of their first year class. And they do that so that they can keep their bar passage rates up. They believe at least that if you're going to not do good your first year of law school, you're probably not made for this. You won't pass the bar. That'll look bad on us if we don't output bar passing attorneys. But the bigger problem was that the school that I happened to choose, different than all the other schools, there's like five law schools, maybe four law schools down in San Diego. I happened to choose the law school that, well, most law schools across the board cut the bottom like 3%. Like that's kind of an average number, 3%. So if you're in a class of 100, like three kids go home. The school I happened to choose cut the bottom third. And so a third of the class went home after the first year. I'm halfway through the second semester already. And here I am getting noticed that I'm not welcome back at the school anymore. And man, I had just had my first baby at that point. We had relocated. We had a lease that still went on for another three months. You know, we were, it was quite the world rocking experience. So needless to say, my attorney career at that point came to an abrupt halt. We moved back to Vegas. I went back to being a legal assistant at the law firm I was at previously. And that's just not, that wasn't going to be my career. For some people it is and it's a great career. But for me, it wasn't going to be my career. So I started looking for other things to do, which I've always been a big tech and marketing guy. My dad, he never actually did anything with marketing, but he loved it. And so my whole childhood, I remember driving around looking at like empty Kmart buildings and imagining what could be in that building and why they put that billboard up. And so I just had this love for marketing. And at that point, my good friend was, had an agency. It was called Engage Media. And sorry, I'm talking a lot. So we're here to hear from you. He was doing some good stuff. I'd actually used him on my, so my parents at that point owned a trampoline park called Flippin' Out. And so I had used his agency to do some of the marketing for the trampoline park. The law firm I was working at, I had him do some marketing for the law firm that I was working at. And I knew what he had going on. And this is 2010. This is really early with social media marketing, especially like most people thought it was crazy that he had a social media marketing agency because you just didn't do that yet. This is before Facebook business pages, right? Like everybody was using profiles. And so I had watched what he'd done. And I was kind of like, you know what? I could do this. I want to help. So I approached him. We were good friends. He was like, you know what? Use the help. Let's do it. And so we join up. And within like a week, I realized that pretty much every one of his clients were about to fire him. And the way I knew that was every time I went to a new client meeting, they said, can we have all of our usernames and passwords? I was like, you're not going to be around much longer, are you? And sure enough, they all went away. And so I quickly said, never mind. Not going to do the agency. I'm going back to work at the law firm. I went back to the law firm. Fast forward a little while later. My same buddy comes back to me and says, look, he had some really good reasons. He actually had a really big client that took most of his time. And so some of the other clients got neglected and whatever. But he came back and said, you know what? Let's team up again. Let's do it. That company's gone. Let's start a new one. Let's do it right. Do it right. 50-50. We're going to kill it. It's going to be great. Marketing, social media marketing, SEO, website development, all the good stuff. And I went for it. So how much detail do you want? I got more detail here. Let's see. We got plenty of memory cards. Go on. So I start doing it part time at that point. He was in charge of sales. I was in charge of execution. And so he would go out and sell $1,000 websites, $2,000 websites. And then I would work at night with our Indian development team because that's when they worked. So it was convenient. I worked at my attorney job during the day and my marketing job at night. They built websites and then we'd send them off to Chad and he'd get them back and life was good. And then finally about four or five months into it, he landed a $50,000 website, which we had no business building, but we were going to figure it out. You know, like he sold it. And so I quit the firm, went full time into the agency, never looked back after that. We ended up building the website. I ended up realizing that the websites we were building weren't great. And so I became a self-taught developer at that point. So I started building all the websites. And then over the next 12 years, we built a team, had about 15 people on the team at the peak, did a lot of good stuff over the years for a lot of people. So it was a good time. Yeah, that's how we get to... But something pulled you back. Something pulled you back. That was the initial question. That's right. Something pulled you back into... That's why I have the cards. That's right. Something pulled you back into the legal world. So yes, the tie-in is COVID, like everybody, right? So this is a COVID story. So COVID happens. We had 15 people. We go down to two people overnight. Me and my partner were the only two people left, right? And this unique storm happens for marketing agencies. A lot of people don't realize this, but when COVID happened, businesses stopped doing all their advertising. So we went down to nothing overnight. But about two months into the pandemic, this unique storm of circumstances came up where all these business owners had a ton of free time because they weren't open. They couldn't do anything. So they had a ton of free time. What did they look at? Well, they looked at all their marketing and online efforts in the past. Now they had the need more than ever for that stuff to work. So they needed to have it fixed up. And all of a sudden, all these businesses had a real desire to make changes and money to fuel it. So we started getting a bunch of clients that we didn't have before. Now to your building a business perspective. So when I first started Neon Brand, I even remember the first meeting. It was at Casa Don Juan right over here on Main Street. I was with Chad. And one of the things we talked about was Chad. I told him was, look, I want to build a dope team that builds cool marketing and cool marketing. Cool websites for everybody with the eventual goal of someday taking that dope team and putting them on our own project. That was the goal from the beginning. And so our initial plan with getting to that goal had always been for those first 10 years almost was reinvest in the team, reinvest in the team, reinvest in the team all the time. Like I, when we were at 15 people, I was making embarrassingly little money. Like it was all about building the team. I don't know how I survived. I was making that much money. And so now COVID happens and we let everybody go. My partner and I said, you know what? We're gonna do it different this time. You know, we're gonna focus on smaller team and we're gonna, you know, bring some of that, bring more of that home and try to execute the same level we were doing before. And an interesting thing happened, right? Like all of a sudden we were able, like I look back and it's like, we were doing about this. We were probably doing more post COVID with four people on the team than we were doing with 15 people on the team pre COVID. But I was making way more money than I had ever made previously. What enabled you to do that? What were you doing different as a leader that enabled you to be much more productive with four than with 15? The realization was how much time it took to manage that team of 15 people. So my job pre COVID was keeping everybody on task, like finding work for them to do, making sure they're doing it. Helping them when they're stuck, which was a full time job for me to be doing that. And what we found was, well, we could have been more efficient for sure. But when we took that job away, because me and my partner were the experts, right? Like at the end of the day, we knew it better than anybody else. And we knew, and there's also unique perspectives. When you're a founder, you can sell and build whatever you want. When you're a sales guy, you have to sell and build whatever the boss says you can do. But in that different perspective of now being the sales guy and the executioner, that's a weird word, we were able to deliver way more than we were with a full team with just the small team. Just because we were faster, quicker, more nimble, able to change to whatever the client needed and deliver faster. Did you bring in a whole new team to do that? Or was this a subset of your other team? It was a subset. It was a subset of the other team. And it was very different. This leads into the original question because post COVID, we were all remote. And so we haven't even talked about the co-working space. So this new team, while we were all in person before, I'm a huge, I love the people part of work. Like that was my driving force of building a 15 person team. I loved seeing my team. Like that was what I was all about and helping them do better and learning how we can work together. Post COVID, there were me and my partner and two more helpers assistants that did websites and some of the marketing stuff and some of the customer service stuff. And they were all remote. Even during the summer of 21, which is kind of where this pivot happens to record, I was mostly at the office by myself most days. My partner was on a lot of business trips, visiting clients around the country and had some vacations too in there. And most days I'd find myself sitting in a room by myself staring at a wall thinking, I'm making more money than I've ever made before. We're doing great things. This is really, really good. But do I want to do this? Like, I don't have any people. Like that was my people. We're my people. I liked that part of work and I didn't have it at that point. So I started dabbling with other things on the side where back to my original idea I had when I started Neon Brand. I wanted to be in a startup. I wanted to be in a tech thing. And I figured it wasn't going to happen the way I intended. I wasn't going to be building the team anymore. So my perspective changed to, I need to find a team to join. And then my perspective changed to, well, what are my skills that I can offer a team if I'm going to join a team? And it was more tech. So I wanted to be, at that point in summer of 21, I started thinking, I need to be a better developer and I need to be a better, I need to be better at building product. Because I had gotten out of it with my team and everything else. I can build a WordPress site in 30 seconds. But when it came to doing anything more than that, I really lacked. And so I jumped into a coding school, signed up for a bunch of boot camps, really dug in on trying to build my skill set so that I can go and offer myself as a CTO, is what I wanted to be for a startup. Give me your idea and I will build it. That was my goal. So I ended up at a conference up in Utah. It's a three day long conference. I had actually been to it before. But this time I went with the express desire to find a startup to join. I was going to go in and I was going to say, you know what? Because I remember going previously and the number one thing all these startups needed was a tech co-founder. I was like... The number one thing we have going on in Vegas. I'll be that guy. Exactly. Exactly. And so I figured it would be an easy deal. I get up there and a lot of the startups that were there were great. Some of them were looking for tech. They weren't very good matches for me for a lot of reasons. And we're only in like... It's a three day seminar. So it's really, really quick. It's all day, all three days, but it's not very long. And on day two, I'm sitting in the room. It's a conference room. We're all around this table. There's only like 20 people in there. And I get a text message from my old attorney boss. Now, some backstory on my relationship with my old attorney boss for the decade I was doing Neon Brand. He and I grew really close when I worked there. Like really close. We were good friends. He's got me by about 10 years, but we're really good friends. Both love technology. He bought me my first iPhone. When the iPhones came out, he bought me my first iPhone. Like really cool. And through the years, through the decade of Neon Brand, every so often, maybe once a year, maybe once every year and a half, he'd send me a text message and say, Hey, you ready to come back and work for me yet? And I'd always say, No, I'm doing this Neon Brand thing, man. I'm good. I'm good. I get that message every, every so often. Well, I'm sitting in this meeting, looking at a screen about startups, learning about startups, blah, blah, blah. And I get a text message from Dean. And this text message, text message does not say what all the previous text messages say. This one says, Hey, this is the last time I asked, I'll ask, I swear. And this time it's different. And he says, I'm not asking you to come work for me again. He says, Well, we've been building, we've been building a case management system for personal injury. And we've been building it inside of our law firm. And we want to take it to the market. And we're wondering if you want to help or do that. Do you want to be the lead and take it to the market? And I took a picture of the screenshot startups, you know, like, yeah, I'm interested. And so, again, I've been out of PI for 10 years. I didn't want to be a PI guy. Like, this is not my life's goal at this point to be in. Personal injury anymore. But I was kind of good at it back in the day. I was kind of a good personal injury. And I've learned everything about it. And so when this happened, it was kind of like one of those serendipitous things like, you know what, if there's any industry I could disrupt, it's the personal injury industry. And I know a ton about it. I know they're super belayed their technology. I mean, attorneys, like literally, like last year are still learning how to text their clients. Like, that's how behind they are. I think you still see a lot of fax machines. Everywhere. Everything is faxed. They write paper checks everywhere. I mean, there's so many people. They're so old school for so many reasons. It's like, this might be the opportunity I needed. And so that's what kicks off. And then there's a whole story about what record, how record is what it is now from where we started. We're going to get to that too. Don't jump ahead. It's very different. It sounds like you did everything possible you could to not be a tech founder and to not go back into the PI industry. And yet here you are. A hundred percent. And it's, you know, it's ironic or whatever it is, but, you know, I'm going to get my PI money one way or the other. You know, they kicked me out of law school. I'm going to find it. You are, you are probably going to be selling record to every single one of those lawyers. That's the goal. That you were in law school with. Let's shift gears a little bit. I do want to get into what was different when you started the platform versus what you're doing now. Yeah. A quick question going back to when you were running a remote team, what do you think, because there's this whole argument about, can teams really be remote? Yeah. You're as frustrated with it as I am, I'm sure. What do you think were the keys to success for running a remote team? You know, I, I have a remote team right now. I'm the only guy that goes to the office right now. And I love the guys. They're all great. It is so different than being in an office with people. Um, it takes a lot more patience and it takes a lot more, um, communication. Like you gotta be, you gotta be very clear on your expectations. You gotta be very clear. You gotta be able to be bold. You have to be bold sometimes where it's awkward to say, no, like you need your camera on because this is the only time we see each other. And there's a human element to our, to our team here. And I want to know you're a person. Like you gotta turn it on, uh, which isn't fun. Like they should be able to leave their camera off, you know, whatever. But for me, teams are super important. Always has been. So being a little bold and I think it's makes it makes a difference. You know, when you're saying if we're going to be remote, we're going to do it as in the most human way possible, the human connection way possible. So it's hard if I'm choosing, I'm not choosing remote at the end of the day. Like if there were an option, I'm a, I'm an in person guy. I still love my in person team. Um, but I actually, that's probably not entirely true. There's probably a hybrid that I'd actually go for because I do like seeing people, but I do understand the value of being locked in a room by yourself and especially with coders. Yeah. I, I, I see it a lot of ways when I was in the air force, I, we, we sent teams and I took teams all over the world when I was doing rapid prototyping. And sometimes the only communication we would have with back home was driving to a pay phone somewhere in whatever country we're in and talking like in code for two or three minutes about how things are going for the day. Uh, so, uh, one of the big challenges I see with working with remote teams is how do you maintain that culture? How do you keep people engaged with the meaning of what they're doing? Why, what they're doing is important. Have you had, is that a challenge for you? Do you have advice on that for the audience? I wish I could unlock that secret, but what I, what I'm doing and I hope it's working. And if my team watches this, let me know if it's working is, uh, is, uh, I try to be very, I try to regularly engage with the team on goals and, and expectations. So they probably get sick of it, but I'm posting in there. Hey guys, these three things are most important right now. And here's how tech fits into those three things. I'm raising money. That's number one. But in order to raise money, I got to have this tech thing. That's number two. And then in order to do that tech thing, you got to do this tech thing. And that's number three and constantly keeping them aware of where my mind's at as the founder and then being super understanding, like, because I'm a developer myself, I understand that code takes a while. And I know that estimates are meant to be broken and they're always going to take longer than you think it's times two plus two every time. And so I'm aware of all those things that I'm, and I'm understanding, but also the business requires speed and agility and fast and moving quick. And it's a startup. So that's what we have to do. And so I try to just keep them reminded of we're going for good, not great. We need, we need done, not perfect. And let's move forward because we got to get this thing on the road. Do you have expectations for them to step up and take more of a leadership role? Because you're, you're raising money. And that is pretty much a full time job. Oh my gosh, is it ever. So it depends on the, depends on the member of the team. And as our team has grown, yes. That has been one of the great parts about growing our team has been like, Oh, you can take care of that now. Thank you. I'm not going to, that's, that's no longer going to occupy part of my brain. Um, and so passing that off is definitely part of what I'm doing and trying to be good at delegating. I mean, delegating is, is it can either make or break you, right? Like, uh, 100% can be great or it can be the end of everything. And so I try to, I tend to be, uh, I don't, I, I am very hands off on 99% of things. Um, except for when it comes to making sure people are getting their stuff done. So I'll let you have your space. Like you do it however you want to do it. Um, you're doing it though, right? Like just checking in, uh, just checking in. You're doing it, right? Okay, cool. As long as you're doing it, we're good. So I don't micromanage in that way, but I do try to stay on top of things to make sure they're moving down. Yeah. Setting clear expectations is important. And if that expectation is there's an outcome, you need to deliver an outcome, right? I'm not going to get in the middle of how you deliver an outcome, right? But don't forget you need to deliver me an outcome. By the way, how's that outcome coming? Yeah, exactly. You know, you know, trying to keep moving down the tracks. Well, that sounds fantastic. Yeah. So, all right. So let's get back into what was the vision for record when you started, when you, when you came back into the PI fold and they said, we've got this and we want to take it further. Yeah. What was the, what was, was it their vision you were trying to execute? Did you have a vision initially? What was that initial vision? So I had been to this thing called startup ignition a couple times by this point. It's this, it's, it's that bootcamp actually. So in the bootcamp, it's all about building a startup and the necessary components to the startup. And so I had this knowledge in my head of like, if we're going to do this startup, here's the boxes we need to check. You know, we need to make sure somebody else hasn't already done this. Duh, right? Like we need to make sure that none of the stuff we're trying to do is patented. Okay. Duh. And like, we need to make sure that those people that have done it, if we think we can do it better, that we can actually do it better. And we can afford to do it better. We can make it all the way till we win at the end of the day. So I had all these boxes in my, or all these check boxes in my head that I had to figure out with regards to the thing that they had already built. Um, now what they had built was a case management software for personal injury firms. And it's honestly great. It's actually a really good platform. It works wonderfully for their law firm. Um, the attorneys derive a ton of value out of it. It helps make all the staff job easier. Uh, it does a ton of good stuff, has AI and machine learning. And they were doing that before open AI came out. I mean, so it's got a lot of cool stuff, but that was only one of the check boxes. Like make sure it's dope. Yeah. Okay. That's that box. Um, but now it was, what's the competition doing? And so when I came in, I asked them that question, they, they had knew who the comp, they knew who the competition was. And I actually knew some of them because of my past experience. We changed three times when I was at the law firm to different case management systems. When I started, they were paper files, like old school. And I was the first one to help digitize, scanned every file in and created systems with it. So I knew case management was a thing. Um, I knew it really well, but I didn't know about the current competition. And so for about three months, I set up demos under the guise of investigating for the law firm, whether or not they should be using a case management software. And I was sincere. Like my goal was to say, stop building what you're building because this guy's already doing it way better. Like that would have been a successful time for me, um, in doing those demos. I'm glad you point that out. Cause a lot of, a lot of people don't think that's a success when you go find out someone's doing it and doing it better. Right. And, and that, that can be a catalyst in your startup to either say, we've got to, either we should go invest our time and money in something else, or we really have to, we really have to go disrupt this. We have to go further than these guys are. Uh, I have a lot of thoughts on that. Let's put a pin in it because I got a lot of thoughts on that because of being in the startup scene for so long here. I a hundred percent agree. It's a big deal. It's a big deal. So I started doing that. I started trying to find the proof that said, don't build this app. And, uh, I demoed a bunch of them and there were probably three that really stood out and two of them did not, none of them. Okay. Let me start over. None of them had the same capabilities that the current one did, but two of them had gajillions of dollars already invested in them. And they were so far ahead as far as market share and everything else that you need in order to win that we, we may have been able to beat them, but the odds were very low. Um, it was not in our favor. And so my advice at the end of all of it was don't take this to market. This is not what you should be building. These guys are already doing it and they're already way further along. It's not a wise move. Stop and use them. That was what I, that was the, that was the resolution I came up with, which they weren't stoked. About, um, they have a lot of pride in their app and to them, even if it did never go to the market, it was already driving value for them inside of their own firm. They were settling for hire and doing all the things that they're, they wanted to do with it anyway. So it wasn't a lost or sunk cost or anything in that way. But as far as taking the market. So here comes Kenny taking one more step to not be a tech founder. Exactly. Exactly. And it sucked. But that was one of the things I learned at the startup thing was, you know, like, make sure, like, don't waste your time. Like if it's, if you're going to lose better to, learn and lose soon than learn and lose after you spent who knows how much time and money building something that's going to lose ultimately anyway. But I told them, um, through that process of interviewing all these case management softwares, uh, and being, being in PI again and thinking about where I'm at in my career and neon brand. And all this is just on the side right now. I'm just doing it nights and weekends, trying to learn all this. It was kind of like, you know what? I need to build something for PI. Like it's not going to be your case management software, but I'm going to do something. And we actually had, we had this tool that we, me and Dean built on Excel, my first foray into, uh, into programming because Excel is programming at the end of the day. And I am a huge Excel person. I love it. And that was my first programming love. We built a spreadsheet that automatically calculated settlements and then it would predict, uh, it would help you negotiate and then it would create the disbursement. And this was all in Excel. And, uh, in the 10 years I did neon brand, I always kind of toyed with that, like being something that I would build. And so when I told them that sucks, I said, but we should build a settlement calculator thing. Like, I think this would go well. All around that same time we decided when, when we decided we should, we should proceed because we hadn't done anything formally. We weren't paperwork partners or anything yet. We were just a guy doing some investigation. But when we decided we're going to go forward with something, we just didn't know what we all, there were four co-founders at the time, uh, which there's some fun stories there we could talk about. Um, we all went to startup ignition together and attended that conference because up till then it was all in my brain. And I needed my co-founders to understand all this cool stuff that I had learned about startups. And, uh, it was up there where they got on board with this, uh, problem hunting is what they call it, problem hunting idea. Um, which I actually teach my UNLV students about right now. Um, the idea being don't build something that ain't broke, right? Like if there's not a real problem, then there's no real solution. And so I started interviewing attorneys, uh, which took forever. I spent like six months interviewing like 50 total. Like that's not a good ratio. That's one every few days if I'm lucky. Um, but it's 50 more than a lot of startup founders interview when they start a startup. Exactly. And so we started when I'm doing this problem hunting, it's a couple of different things. It's, it's really, the conversation is not about my idea. I go in with an idea. I went in every one of the meetings with an idea, but I didn't go in to pitch the idea and I didn't get the meeting on the premise of the idea. I got the meeting on the premise of I'm doing research. I just want to get your feedback on what it's like to be a personal injury attorney and just tell me about stuff. And so I'd go in and say, what do you listen to on the drive to work? Oh, I'm a podcast guy. Which podcast? Oh, these podcasts. Oh, okay. That's interesting. I'm thinking, why are they listening to that? I'm figuring that out where I'm sports radio guy. Oh, what's your favorite team? Oh, do you have roots in Chicago? You know, wherever the team is, you know, and I'm having this conversation just trying to get to know them as a human, because ultimately that's what they are at the end of the day. And they want to have, they have real goals and desires. Like one of the attorneys I talked to, sorry, I talked really fast too. You guys are probably realizing that. One of the attorneys I talked to told me his two goals are to, oh shoot, I'm going to forget them. But he said to spend more time with his family was one of the two. And that's really important when you're building a tech solution to know what the goal of life is for these guys. And so those were the conversations I was having. And along the way, I'd pick up on something that was annoying them. So what's the first thing you do when you get to the office? Oh, well, I usually go in, I check the mail slot. And then if I check the mail slot and if there's any checks in there, then I'll make sure the checks. And it's like, oh, so you get all these checks via paper. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody mails checks. Oh, okay. And what do you do with the check after that? Oh, well, we do this, this, and this. And a lot of these things, because I worked in the PI firm, I knew this already, but it was more of a hunt to find whether or not that problem existed elsewhere. And so I go through this process. I'm interviewing these people. And if the conversations resulted in a way I could talk about my idea, then I would. And sometimes they wouldn't. It would never get there. We'd end the conversation. My idea would never come up. But if there was a natural segue into, hey, I have an idea. Can I tell you about it? I would. And so I started off with an idea of the settlement calculator. And now, that's for 10 years from when I built it the first time in Excel. We've got all kinds of cool tools out there. I could do some really cool predictive analysis stuff using not just Excel, but AI is a thing. Machine learning was a thing before ChatGPT was a thing. And that was in the time that we were doing this. ChatGPT didn't come along until after we had our final idea. And so I go into these law firms with this idea. And this is another very interesting thing that happened. And a lot of them would give me feedback that says, this is cool. I like this. And then the main thing you're supposed to ask is, well, if it was built right now, would you buy it? Can I take a prepayment right now and see if, and when it comes out in two months, you can have it for that discounted price and see if people wanted it, right? Nobody wanted it. Nobody wanted to pay for this settlement calculation idea. And so then the follow-up, of course, is, well, why not? What's the holdup? And interestingly, the attorneys felt like, and this was across the board, the many that I asked, was the attorneys felt like it was taking their only job. Like, that's what I'm here for. I'm the guy who negotiates cases. I'm the guy who predicts outcomes. If I'm not here, or if that's doing that for me, then what point am I in being here? It's not that the tool wouldn't have worked. The tool would have worked great. We could have predicted every case. They could have plugged in like five things, and I would have known how much every case is worth in a heartbeat. There's actually some startups out there doing that right now. It's not going to be good. It's going to be good for you. It's going to be good for me, but they didn't feel like they'd pay for it. So ultimately, it wasn't that the product was bad. It's that they didn't want it in their office. They'd have never given me money for the solution, so it wasn't a real problem because they didn't want the solution. They were totally content with the way they were doing it. So I'd pivot, and I'd pivot, and I'd pivot, and I'd pivot. I pivoted six times over those interviews. I interviewed not only attorneys. I interviewed about 50 attorneys. I also interviewed 20 doctors because of personal injury. A lot of a case is built on what the doctors experience. So I interviewed them and learned all about their side of the story. I interviewed clients of attorneys because I wanted to know what their experience was like. Went through all this validation on problem hunting and solution finding, and I'm pretty sick of being told my ideas suck at this point. I'm going on six months of, nah, we wouldn't pay for that. Pretty much at the end of my rope. Like, I'm not doing this for much longer. This isn't going to work. And I'm in an interview with a buddy, and he knows my story, and he brought up, he said, let me tell you about my favorite client. I'm like, yeah, tell me about your favorite client. I mean, I had favorite clients. Everybody has favorite clients. Tell me about favorite. Well, this favorite client, every time he had a doctor's appointment, he would text me and tell me he was gone. And then after he got out, he would text me and tell me what happened. I never needed to reply, but I had it in my phone in case I needed it. And then at the end of the case, he showed up with an Excel sheet with every doctor appointment he ever went to, and all the information related to each one, the bill amount, all that. Just laid it right out. It's giving me a spreadsheet. All I did was plugged it into a demand and sent off the letter, and we settled the case almost immediately. It was wonderful. I was like, okay. And you're probably thinking like me. I was thinking, I could do that with technology. Like, I know Excel. I know what he was doing. And it also sounds like a real need that attorneys and doctors have, right? Yeah. It's like, I can enable. I can do that. Back up for a second. One of the other things that I, one of the other pivots was a messaging platform where I was going to make it easier for clients and attorneys to message each other. That idea got told no. They thought it was cool, but told no primarily because they didn't want to change their own behavior. And that was a theme across a lot of my ideas. A lot of my ideas were based on adding a new software to the attorney side to make the staff or the attorneys or the receptionist somebody do better at their job. They all hated it. It was too, oh, we got to do more tech. So that was kind of, that was one of the things that was on my mind all the time. So back to my friend. So he tells me about his favorite client. And then for whatever reason, I said, well, tell me about your worst client. And he says, oh, man, let me, I got lots of those. You know, I got lots of worst clients. They're the ones that never call, never write. They disappear. They don't go to doctor's appointments. They fail on their thing. So you found yourself a root cause and you found something that your target market was willing to pay for. But only a sample size of one at that point. I had a buddy that was telling me about this. And so my next course of action was to ask all the other 49 people that I'd interviewed before if they had a similar experience. So I went back and asked a bunch of them, not all of them. And meeting after meeting, the same story is involved, right? Like these are my favorite things that clients that I like do. These are the things that all the other clients do, all the worst clients. And every time I'm thinking, I can replicate the good stuff and I can make it easier for those that don't do it to do it more. Huge opportunity, right? Better living through technology. Exactly. And it doesn't affect the attorney's job. They don't have to do anything different. So I'm not introducing a new software for them. It's for their clients. And it evolves faster. The pricing and everything else gets really interesting when it's something for the client. So out of that is born record where we are helping clients be better clients. Like at the end of the day, it's that easy. And it turns out nobody else is doing that yet. There's a couple that are trying. They're doing it in different ways. It actually goes back to when I worked at the law firm. Everybody wanted a client portal. That was the thing. That was the way to help customer service with clients was give them access to stuff that we're working on in the firm. Everybody wanted it. Nobody used it because every time you turn it on, everybody was scared that the wrong thing was going to show up inside the attorney portal. And the client would see it like, oh, my gosh, I hate this client. Oh, no, the client saw that. We're in trouble. So they end up not using it. Where what we're doing, so that was very attorney-to-client focused messaging. We're not doing any attorney-to-client stuff. We're doing all client-to-attorney-driven stuff. So as long as they're feeding information in, it helps them stay connected. We're using AI and chat-like things to give them information in the moment. Like they add an MRI. We teach them why they go to MRIs, all that stuff. Awesome. That's where we end up. Phew, that was a long story. That is fantastic. But now we know what record is. We've answered a lot of my questions. So that's fantastic. You're really focused on creating a scalable platform. So with all you've done in the past, different experiences with different businesses, what's different about trying to create a scalable tech platform? Man, it's hard. And that's why not a lot of people do it. If you can make it through the slog of getting something that works the right way, then you can find a lot of success. So I love the scalable startups. That is, I wish more people would try to build scalable startups. That's where, like as far as the ecosystem, and we talked about that before. Like I love Las Vegas. I'm born and raised here. You know, this is my home. I've been in the startup scene for a long time. When I owned the co-working space, I was in the startup scene for a long time. You don't see a lot of scalable startups in Las Vegas. We won some award for the most startups last year or something like that. I was astounded. I was like, where? Where are those startups? It's a lot of small businesses get born here, which are great. They're great. They're part of the economy. We need those. I was one. My agency was one for a lot of years. We generated a lot of revenue. But the real magic of a startup, the thing that people think of when they think startups, when they think of Silicon Valley, the show, you know, those are scalable startups. And that is what I am enticed by is this ability to, and for anybody who isn't sure what that means, basically in a traditional small business startup, your operational expenses and your profit margins are running in parallel. If you hope. If you hope. You hope. Yes. In a perfect world. You want to make more money? You got to spend more money. And it just goes up forever like that. And that's how accounting, lawyers, everybody operates in that small business realm. Where a scalable startup is different. And obviously, you've probably talked about this before on your things. Is eventually the operational costs should plateau or at least slow down dramatically. And incrementally, you don't have to spend as much money. And your upside can scale indefinitely, essentially, with minimal cost increases. So that's what we're going for. The platform we hope to build or what we've built and hope to scale is a platform that any attorney can use. And I can be the customer support backbone and help clients be better clients. How are you setting up your team and developing your team to have that mindset about scalability to get them on, you know, we got to think like this? Yeah. That is a hard thing. You got to know about my team. I have a pretty unique team right now. You want me to tell you? Yeah. So it goes back to founders. I started off with CTO. I'll tell this part in a small story. Started off with me as CEO, a CTO friend of mine who was awesome. CFO. That was great. And a C something else. Four of us gave some Cs. I don't know. They didn't mean anything really. At the end of the day, we were all a bunch of slackers not knowing what we were doing. I lost my CTO nine months in. That's a whole story. We could do a whole podcast off of it. It was really sad and really not fun for me because it cost me a lot of money. And at the end of the day, I didn't have anything to show for it. And then my CFO at the time decided that he wasn't a good fit. He self-decided, which I respect him for greatly. It's the hard decision to make in the tech community. For sure. I'm not the right fit for that. I need to move on to something else. I need to let somebody else step in here. And so he self-selected out and canceled all the shares. He's out. And so that left me and my co-founder attorney friend. And then since then, we've brought on a CXO, who's awesome. We've also, well, I'll tell this in order because I had my CXO, who was great. He helped me build so much stuff. Brought in a contractor to help us get to market. That was great. And during that time was when I was at a Startup Vegas event. And I'm sitting in a room out at WeWork. And this is why these events are important and everybody should go to them. I sat down next to some dude I'd never met before as these things go. And small talking with him. His name's Alejandro. I'm like, oh, what do you do? He's like, oh, I work for UNLV. He's like, oh, cool. What do you do for UNLV? You know, small talking, networking stuff. And he says, oh, I run the internship program. Oh, which college? Computer science, engineering. What do you mean? What? Tell me more. And so it turned out they were at the start of a new program where they were paying for interns to work in jobs. I was like, bruh, how fast can I sign up? So in like three days, I was the guy's first onboarded person. And boy, did I feel it because they didn't know what they were doing over there. They're good now. But it was a painful process at the beginning. I onboarded two interns from UNLV. They're rock stars. I've told them they should not be in school. They should have careers in coding because they already know it all. Like it's tricky with them. But they're great. And so they worked with me through the summer. And towards the end of the summer, now operationally, it's me, my CXO. And I'm acting CTO at this point because I know how to code. And there's so much to try to CEO and CTO. It's not fun. And two interns. So there's four of us plus Dean who's really just co-founder in name. He helps with industry knowledge. Sure. But not in building the product. I need a CTO. I needed a CTO real bad. And so I was driving down the road one day, another serendipitous type thing. I got a whole note log of all the serendipitous things that have happened with this thing. And I remember my friend Lucho. I hit him up. Turns out he's interested. One thing leads to another. He says, yeah, I'll take on your CTO. He has a full-time job, so he's working only at nights right now. But I found my CTO. That was great. Big, huge relief. And then the fall semester starts. And I go back to UNLV because every internship only runs for the semester. And I go back to UNLV and I say, so how many of these interns can I have? Paid for, mind you, 100% by UNLV. And they said, how many do you need? Pick a number. I can do a lot. So I came up with six. He said, what are you going to do with six? ChatGPT, what would you do with six interns? Here you go. Send it over to them. They approved me for six interns. So I onboarded two more immediately. So I have four interns. And just this morning, I offered two more interns. So we're going to have six total interns working for us by the end of this week. Plus Lucho, plus Garrett, plus me. So it's a unique team. These guys are focused on school. And they're not necessarily all the interns, that is. They aren't necessarily experienced coders. But they are not, I'm not paying for them. I am paying. The process is pay and reimburse. But it gives them the liberty to spend a little more time than I normally would allow an employee to spend. Because, you know, if you're footing the bill, build my stuff fast as you can because I need it. But also, if it takes you an extra day, it's fine. Yeah. Well, it sounds like you got yourself a ball game now. So, yeah. Yeah. It's busy. It's busy. And I can't remember your original question now. That's okay. I'm sure it was answered. We were talking about developing your team. And I think that's as good an answer to any. What is some advice through all of this? Is there any other advice you have for founders, especially if they don't come from a tech background and they want to get into this tech space? Yeah. So, so many people, and we've touched on it a little bit. Actually, this is the part where I said put a pin in it. One of the things I learned was traditionally when we think about building a startup, it's a three-step process. It's traditionally have an idea, build a cool thing, show people said thing, and hope they like it. That's what we've done for years. That's like the GM model almost. Like have an idea, build it, show them. The people will like what we tell them to like. The people will like what we tell them to like. Exactly. And that's broken because what happens is they tell you something's wrong with it. You've already spent all this time and money. Now you've got to change the thing that you've built, and that cost a lot of money. And you've already spent a lot of money to get it to where it's at. So the real way, those same three steps are what people should be doing. Founders should be doing those same three steps, except for take the customers from the end and put them in the middle. Ask your hundred people first. Have the idea and then go ask people. And hope they tell you no. Like that's the crazy part. Like hope they tell you there's lots of strategies around getting them to tell you no if they really do mean it. The mom test is an excellent book. I read it all the time. Yeah, it's a good one. Perfect for this scenario. But if they tell you no, just think of how much time they've saved you. I actually, when I was doing my interviews with all these attorneys and I'd present my idea, the times that I'd present my idea, I'd preface my idea with, look, I haven't built this at all yet. If you tell me this sucks, you're actually saving me a ton of money. So please don't hold back. If this is not something you want, tell me now. Yeah. And then I'd give them the idea and they would feel so much better telling me, no, you should not build that, dude. I'm going to save you a bunch of money right now. Whereas if I'd gone in there saying, hey, I already built this cool shiny toy. What do you think? They'd have felt obligated to say, yeah, I guess it's fine. Sure. It's cool. Yeah, that's cool. Not for me. Or maybe they would never even tell me not for me. Maybe they lie and say, yeah, I'd buy that. And then I go spend a bunch more time and money on it. So that's my tip for founders. Make sure you validate that the problem you're solving is real and that people will actually buy your solution before you spend any time on it. Well, kudos on doing what we all tell everyone in the startup community they should do and doing your market research and asking 100 people first. Kudos to that. I know a lot of people will watch this and still not do it. So you want to play a game? Sure. All right. We're going to play a game. It's called This or That. I'm going to ask you a This or That. Okay. And you're going to respond with This or That or whatever pops into your head. Oh, boy. So don't feel like you are limited by my choices. Okay. All right. Ready to go? Ready. This or That round. Kenny Eliason, your time begins now. Digital or analog? Digital. Dogs or cats? Dogs. Yankees or Red Sox? Red Sox. Yes. I went to the playoff game a couple years ago. No. At Fenway? At Fenway. Yeah. It's always great to see a game at Fenway. I highly recommend it. Sweet or spicy? Spicy. Halloween or Thanksgiving? Halloween. East Coast or West Coast? West. Vegas. Sunrise or sunset? Sunrise. I think I know the answer to this one. Downtown or The Strip? Downtown, baby. Downtown. DTLV for life. Dress up or casual? Casual. This is the most dressed up I'd like to be. I think it's the most dressed up I've ever seen here. Instagram or TikTok? Neither. Instagram, I guess. I don't like either of them anymore. But yeah. Twitter. X. Twitter? X all day. Wow. Now you know we got a real tech guy on the show because he's all about X and not these other visual platforms. Great. Well, thank you for playing our game with us. Fantastic. It's a good way to get to know you a little bit. Going back to your team. Yeah. You guys are all either experienced tech guys or you're growing people, young folks into experienced tech guys and girls. What are some of your favorite tech tools working in record that you guys can't live without? Like, I mean, Slack all day. Slack, Notion. Some new ones that Lucho has actually introduced us to is a cool app called Linear. I think it's a newer one on the scene. It's for issue tracking, which has really, really grown to love. And it's not a tool necessarily, but new databasing. It's called Supabase. Really enjoying working with those new things that have been introduced to lately. So other than that, Visual Studio. We use GitHub Copilot a lot. The usual suspects. GitHub Copilot's phenomenal. It's amazing what the AI can do inside of your IDE that suggests code completion. It's amazing. You've been part of the Vegas tech scene for probably about as long as there's been a Vegas tech scene. Close. Yeah. What contribution would you like to leave behind for the Vegas tech scene? Man, I love the Vegas tech scene. I was here 2012 when all the DTP stuff started happening. When Shay brought Zappos downtown. A lot of friends with all those guys that were down here. What's interesting is I never had like, I never did business with any of them. I was just kind of on the peripheral. And so we worked out of their co-working space, work in progress. And so we were around them. But I never had a startup. Never worked with startup teams. Never did anything with that. So I just watched it. And then we owned the co-working space. And I tried to do a lot with the startup. Tried to bring that back to work in progress. Tried to bring that back to the U.S., which was great. And long-term, man. So I've seen, I've watched the Utah startup scene really explode. Yeah, they're amazing. It's, yeah, it's, I mean, the past 10 years up there have just been incredible. Like, unfathomable how many startups have come out of there. And not that we're ever going to be that. But long-term, my goal is to grow and scale to a point to where I can help give back in a VC sort of a way slash mentoring. I know there's a lot of people doing a lot of good stuff right now in Vegas. The ratios are still really sad in Vegas. There's only a few people doing good stuff compared to other markets. And I hope to someday be a way that we can attract. I want to be the first big win out of Vegas. Like, we've had a couple wins out of Vegas, and I know of them. But I want to make an impact where people go, oh, they can do stuff in Vegas too. So hopefully we can not only do that with record, but then do it with future companies. I love it. You're singing my tune because you're talking about founders mentoring founders and founders becoming funders. And that's right. As Kurt Walker says. And I think those two things are going to be the key that makes our community successful eventually. I think it's why it didn't happen the first time. Because actually, when I was watching all those first round of startups, a lot of them were focused on technology solutions that were actually exports. We shipped them to other cities. And they exited and had great success. But they were in Austin and San Fran and Tampa or wherever else they ended up with their startups. Or we need to keep some of that here. Homegrown and keep it here all the way to exit. Well, speaking of giving back, you are working with students at UNLV. And you are teaching at UNLV. Man, I got suckered into it again. So what are you teaching them that they're not getting taught in their university education? Whether it's about entrepreneurship, business, life, whatever it is. So I taught at UNLV a couple years ago. And the class I taught was innovation and teams. And I enjoyed that. That was fine. I had done a lot of work with teams. And so the topic was cool. I stopped because I started doing this at the startup. And I did not want to have my focus distracted with teaching. But then they came to me with a new class topic. And this topic really hit me. And I have a deep love for this. And that's starting entrepreneurial organizations is the topic. And so all the stuff we've been talking about is what I'm teaching the kids right now. Awesome. And so we're talking. Last week was all about the mom test and how you should be interviewing people. So the first week they came up with ideas for a business. Now they're going to go out and test those ideas. Next we're going to validate whether or not the solutions they come up with are good. Then we're going to test the solutions. So we're going to go through the whole process of building these startups with these kids right now. And hopefully teaching them a way that actually can scale and grow. Teaching them the difference between scalable startups and small businesses and all that. A lot of people don't even realize there's a difference. What a perfect place to start. Lifestyle businesses. Like there's all these different businesses you can start. And really trying to say, but you really want to do the scalable kind. Because that's where it's at. That's what gets you interviewed on this show. Yeah. No, not true. And also you do have to go to class. You can't just watch this video. That's right. That's right. Although. We'll send you a copy if it'll help. Thanks, yeah. I think I'll get me out of class one day. What was one of the best mistakes you've ever made? And what did you learn from it? Oh, man. I'm the king of mistakes. So I joke a lot that people make a few big decisions in their life. And I made those three big decisions and failed at all three of them. I went to, I got married and then unmarried six months later. Super cool. I bought a house in 2006 and sold it in 2008. Super cool. And I went to graduate school and failed out after one year. Super cool. So I failed on some big ones amongst many other small ones. But I think like at the end of the day, no matter what happens to us, you can spin those in positives. All three of them made me a better person in the long run. I learned so much out of that first marriage in those six tiny months that I now am so grateful for my current wife. She's the best thing that's ever happened. And I have so much more respect for that had I never had that first marriage experience. My house buying experience, man, that rocked my world. I thought I was doing the right thing. And I sold it for a fourth of what I paid for it. You know, like, learned about a ton about money and real estate and how that all works. And how, what a, yeah, real estate. And with law school, I learned so much in my law school career, even just in the year I was there, that I'm still applying it. And it's for sure gets me in the door with so many attorneys right now. Because I think you mentioned it earlier on was, you know, attorneys, when they find out, two things happen. They find out I went to law school. They have an increased measure of respect for me because they say, oh, this guy knows a little bit about what I'm going through. And then when I tell them I failed out, they say, man, you got lucky. So they have an increased amount of respect for me in that way too. So it's worked out great. All the things that are bad can be good. That's fantastic. Who is someone you admire as a leader or in business? Ah, well, I'm going to say the answer that's about 50% of the population is going to hate me for it. But, you know, I'm a huge Elon Musk fan. That's good. That's views and clicks for us. That's right. Musk, man. I love him or hate him. He is fascinating to me. I just got his biography a couple days ago. Just fascinating. Like, he doesn't do a lot of things right for sure. Like, he's missing a lot of very important skills. But the fact that he can do what he's doing right now and run all these businesses like he's running, it's phenomenal. It's phenomenal. And it's going to be a business case for the millennium. It's certainly fascinating to watch, isn't it? It's right. Exactly. So that's my guy. I was a Steve Jobs fan before. And when Steve Jobs, a lot of similarities between the two. A lot of same business tactics. They don't treat people well. Like, they have a lot of problems with their staff and liking them. Never thought there'd be another one. And then Elon comes along and blows it up, too. So who knows what the next one is? Who's next? I don't know. Who's next, right? Well, I think you might treat your team a little better than Elon does. Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So this has been a lot of fun. But running a tech startup, being the CEO, and sometimes the CTO of a tech startup is not always easy. And you've got some big challenges in front of you. What keeps you up at night? What are you thinking about? What are the challenges you need to overcome? And how are you thinking about doing that? So the startup stuff that I did in the early days kind of lays out the startup journey. And startups usually start off all exciting and fun. And then eventually they go through the trough of sorrow. And then if you can survive the trough of sorrow, then hopefully you find success on the other side. We're deep in the trough of sorrow right now. And the trough of sorrow looks like not enough clients, which means not enough interested investors, which means not enough money to pay the employees, which means all the problems that come with all of that. But I've been through hard things a few times now. And if anything, going through this hard thing is just evidence that once we get through it, because we're going to get through it, that we're going to have something great. We're going to be dope on the other side of this. We're going to have learned a bunch. I've already learned a bunch through this process. So much about investing. Or I mean, getting investors. Fundraising, that's the word. And it's going to make us better. It's going to make our product better at the end of the day. We're pivoting. We're changing. We're growing. We're making moves in real time that are going to make the product better. So right now, I'm up sleepless nights because I don't have enough money, which is just what it is. That's life as a founder. That's life as a founder. And it will hopefully not forever, but for a long time into the future, plan on it being the problem. And I mean, that's the main one. And building tech that clients want. And we're getting there, though. We're figuring it out. Well, you're optimistic. So what are you excited about? What keeps you excited to get through that trough of sorrow? You know, I was just talking to a potential client before I came here. And the thing that gets me excited is I have this vision long term of what this becomes. And at the end of that vision is super exciting. I don't know if I'll say it or not, but it's super, super exciting. And the probability of it coming to light and being reality is so high just because of market trends and everything else that I'm confident that we're building today is going to grow into it to like this infinite degree. And so when people tell me like the guy I was talking to before this meeting, he was just kind of worried about it. Didn't think it was going to be great. Like it doesn't slow me down because broader vision of it, like it's going to happen with or without the people that I'm talking to right now. And it's going to be dope. And it's going to be awesome. We're going to make it work. And so I just got that long term vision that and, you know, I've been through the trenches as an entrepreneur for over a decade now. There's been plenty of times where we haven't we don't have enough money for payroll on Thursday and we figure it out and we make payroll on Friday. Like I have no doubt that I'm going to figure that out because I've done it before. And so just knowing that it's going to work out and having that I call it unrealistic optimism where everything's going to be OK when everything says it's not. Well, you need to be as a founder. Yeah. More so than the other folks on a startup team. The other folks on a startup team, you kind of need them to be realistic and, you know, down to earth. But a founder has to have that vision. And I will be clear on one thing because a lot of founders that I've seen over the decade of doing startup stuff in Vegas have that optimism, but they don't do the execution part to back it or the research and everything else that you can have with that optimism. And it can be to your detriment, too. So I feel like for us and not trying to be braggadocious or anything, but we've gone through the trenches of knowing whether or not this is a good idea because we've tested and validated it so much to where I can have that. I rightfully have that optimism at this point. I didn't have it before. After doing all those interviews, I was ready to quit because it wasn't going to be a thing. But now I'm so confident because we know that what we're building does have a future so I can have that confidence. But without that, I don't think it deserves it as much as it might. Love that. Well, it sounds like you've got some plans, and we'll have to have you back after you've executed those so we can find out what those were and how they came to fruition. I do have a couple kind of personal questions for you that we like to wrap with. But before we get into that, what else should we know about Kenny Eliason and Record? Hmm. What else should we know? My background is in hard work. My dad was a laborer. My grandpa was a laborer. You know, you get out what you put in. And that kind of plays out in everything I'm doing, even though it's tech and I'm pushing keys on a keyboard at the end of the day. My mind is still very much the hard work ethic mindset. I'm not trying to do anything easy. I'm not trying to get a quick buck. I'm trying to put in the work and the effort that merits a reward at some point. And the saying is, an entrepreneur's job is to do the things, let me think, do the things now that nobody wants to do so that you can live the life later that nobody can. Nobody else can or something like that. That's where I'm at. I'm in the trenches. And it's okay. And it's hard. And it's supposed to be hard. If it weren't hard, everybody would be doing it, right? Absolutely. So I'm okay with hard work. That's just who I am. That's what I've been trained. My dad, my grandpa, everybody around me has been hardworking people. And so I think that plays out in this scenario as well. I don't have, what do they call it? I don't have quit in me. You know, like I just don't. It's just not a thing. Awesome. Well, where can everybody find you and where can they find Record? I hang out a lot on LinkedIn and Twitter. And both of them are Kenny Eliason, one word. And then getrecord.com is the website. So send your PI friends my way. I'm ready to help them make their lives a lot better. Well, it sounds like you're ready. And sounds like you have something, definitely something of value to offer. I hope so. All right. Someone or something you're grateful for? Oh, well, my wife and my kids. I have four kids. They're all awesome. 11, no, 12, 11, 8, and 5. I hope, I think. They're awesome. Couldn't do any of this without them. Man, they're such a support. My wife, my poor wife, my sweet poor wife. She had to deal with living with an entrepreneur for over 12, 13 years. She thought she was getting an attorney. She ended up with an entrepreneur. It's very different. But she rides the roller coaster and she's patient and she roots me on all the time. So she's great. What was that thing about doing the things you need to do today to live a life knowing you can live tomorrow? Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So keep telling her that's around the corner, babe. We're almost there. 12 years later. But anyway, she's great. And my kids are great, too. Awesome. What is, we've talked about advice for founders. What is any advice you have for young people in general making their way through the world about leadership? Leadership. Yeah. There's a cool book called What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. It's by Tina Selig, I think. It's an awesome book. Talks a lot about that. I learned a lot from that book reading it when I was 35, whatever I was. But the big thing that I tell people, especially young people, I got a friend that just got out of law school. This is a good example. I got a friend that just got out of law school and he had an option to go work at this big firm or to stay at this smaller firm and grow into a lead role. But maybe it might take 10 years and he could jump right up to this big fancy salary at this other firm. The advice was be patient. What you're doing, there's no quick wins like the world wants you to think there is, like social media says there is. Put in your time and effort. Do the grunt work. Do the hard labor. Show up and do the hard crap. And that's what gets rewarded in the long term. If you're not willing to do that stuff now, then you're never going to make it past that fancy job that you think is great. And you will probably won't even stay there very long if you get it. For my attorney friends, stick it out of that smaller firm because eventually you could be running the whole thing. And what would that mean in 10 years from now to you versus getting the job that pays a little bit more in the short term? So put in the effort. Don't be afraid to do hard things. Oh, I got another good book recommendation for you. The book is actually by a guy named Michael Easter, who is actually a professor at UNLV. I don't know him personally, but he just coincidentally is a professor here. He wrote a book called Comfort Crisis. It's phenomenal. It's about doing hard things and how, as a society, we need to do more hard things. And I think you'd love it, especially with your military background. It's not a military book by any means, but it's about pushing yourself, not just doing easy stuff all the time, which we've been trained to do over the last many, many decades, is to focus on the easy stuff. Air-conditioned buildings to air-conditioned cars. We never go outside anymore. It's a great book. So that's another one I'd recommend to a young person. We believe very strongly here in doing the hard things. That's right. For all the reasons you said so. Well, thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing some of your time with us, so much of yourself with our audience. I'm sure they got a ton out of it. I got a ton. And you and I have talked before, and I learned things today that I had no idea about. So thank you for being here today, Kenny Eliason. Thank you all for watching The Leader's Mindset. Whatever you go do today, please make sure you have an impact. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.