I don't want to hold anything back. I mean, America is the greatest startup in the world. What is like a common misconception? They'll get free money. That's not going to happen. I wish VCs would do more to educate founders. Dude, that's a great question. They need the Gordon Ramsay of VC. I think if you really care about someone, you just get up all in it. Yeah, they're going to get some Asian bro loving. And then the hookup culture really infiltrated the VC culture. It's very difficult for Asians to go and to say things that they feel that sometimes even on their chest. I mean, that's a really interesting question. It seems like nowadays, everybody is trying to get rich by starting a company. But to create and expand upon a business, you need funding. And where do you get that funding? Well, one of the ways is from venture capitalists. Today, we sit down with Jason, who's a well-known VC, and he's going to break down everything from what they do on Shark Tank to the biggest mistake founders make early on and why people call him the Gordon Ramsay of the VC world. Hit that like button because this is upside mindset. All right, everybody, we're here for another episode of Upside Mindset. And we're here with Jason Kim from Legendary Ventures. Jason, thanks for being here today. Hey, man, it's really great to be with you guys. Shout out to the Asian community. I'm happy to be here. All right, can you tell us real quickly about yourself? Who is Jason Kim? Yeah, I'm the senior partner of a venture capital firm called Legendary Ventures. We're an early-stage venture firm based out in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. We love supporting entrepreneurs. Personally, I was born and raised in New York, and I'm an Asian bro. All right, man.  Because a lot of people, I'm sure they've heard it. You see that thrown a lot around on financial headlines. But I don't know if everybody's actually looked into it and watched five videos on what is VC. Yeah, venture capital is pretty simple. I mean, it's just financing in an alternative format for, I guess, entrepreneurs who just don't have access to traditional financing opportunities, whether it's banks or other credit facilities. Real quick, could we throw out some examples of maybe a small company that grew needing VC-backed funding? VC-backed is a term that some people hear. So I guess maybe what are two examples? Yeah, I think you can almost look at any company that went public. I mean, we can even use Airbnb or Pinterest, or some companies that we've invested in. At some point, every company in America starts out as a startup. They're growing. Maybe they've put some money into themselves, and they need growth capital to build a business. The banks won't give them a loan. They can't get more money to scale properly. So they'll come to an alternative route of financing, which is venture capital. And I think our requirements are a little bit different than most other traditional financing opportunities. And we'll put money into pre-seed, seed companies. They'll eventually grow as they get more mature. They'll go into different other types of financing models to get them eventually to where they need to be. And when you were mentioning seeds, we got to talk about there's different stages in a company. There's early, middle, late. And you guys specialize at legendary and early. Yeah, so that's interesting. When we use these terms, early, mids, late, I think one of my confusions in the venture community, and I think this happens for a lot of founders, is a lot of VCs have a tendency of defining what stage a company is in, just by the letter of their financing round. Whether like you said, David, is it pre-seed, seed, A, B, C, D, the alpha letters? For us, yeah. For us, an early stage company is anybody, or any company, or any founder that's building a company, their pre-development, they don't have a product, not necessarily live with a product in generating revenue, or if they're generating revenue, it could be somewhat unstable. So I got a question, and just because a lot of people are familiar with Shark Tank, right? I guess like, what is Shark Tank? Are they investing in a lot of early stage generally, I guess? Yeah, are they venture capitalists, or what are they? I think based on their model, it's probably, you could classify it as venture capital. I haven't watched the show too many times, but I think most of their companies are probably pre-development, or maybe at some revenue stage, but it's just unstable, right? Which I would classify as early. So I do think that Shark Tank kind of targets early stage founders and early stage companies. However, it's just confusing because you could be, I mean, there's a lot of companies today that don't have revenue, that are still raising a series at the A or the B, because they're high growth companies, right? So, I mean, it really depends on the sector. You could have a tech company that's raising later stage and larger rounds of financing because they're just growth intensive, as opposed to maybe retail businesses or other sectors that are at revenue, but it's unstable, but they're not growing as fast. So they could still be seen as early stage companies. Jason, I wanna ask you, like before we get too much more in the weeds, like why does it feel like that the term VC or startup and all these things, I'm a founder, it's such a hot term right now. Or I don't wanna just say it's a hot term, it's what a lot of people are looking to do now. Like you even see memes and jokes about it on Instagram. That's when you know, it's like enter the mainstream fray where there's comedians joking about what it is. If you've ever been to any sort of like, even networking party or party or social gathering, there's like founders there. There's people, especially in New York City, right? Finance capital, they're always like, oh yeah, I'm in VC, I'm in VC, I'm a VC. I don't like, what does this all mean? And why did you work for a, what is going on? Why does it feel like this is- Why are there memes about this right now in 2023? I don't think it's, you know, I don't think that the, I don't think it's just a trend. I think, you know, if you look at kind of our overall economy relative to where people are looking for jobs and looking for growth, you know, we live in one of the greatest startups in the world, right? I mean, America is the greatest startup in the world. And I think, you know, back 20 years ago, people were looking for jobs and that there was a lot of stability in that and innovation in that. I think last 10 or 15 years, entrepreneurship has been really hot. And with that entrepreneurship, I think, you know, you've got a lot of people jumping into that ecosystem on both sides, you know, people who want to fund these companies, you also have a ton of founders and, you know, just innovators in the environment. Do you think it's hot partially because of like the old structures of like the pension fund at the job and all this stuff is kind of going away? Or is it also because like, honestly, a lot of people, young people who didn't have that much experience in entrepreneurship, they got a lot of money in the past like five years, maybe through crypto or their startup blew up or they sold this online or something. And I guess like once people saw that a lot of younger people, like maybe even below the age of 30 were making money, then it's almost like that seems more appealing. Yeah, I think there's, I think it's a complex answer. I think there's two parts of it. One, we do to some degree live in, you know, we live in a more modern context where the speed to technology and actualizing revenue and making money and growing is a lot faster than it was 20 years ago, right? So there's that angle of it, which is I could just go into startup and make a quick hit. I think the other problem, which is driving this kind of like, you know, interest in startups is the fact that there's just not enough mentorship and tutoring in America, right? There was a time and period, probably 25 years ago when you joined a company, you had leadership and the leadership wanted to actually develop talent within their companies and bring them up, right? Through management and leadership. And that's why you had 20, 25 year careers doing innovation within kind of a closed community. I think because, you know, today more people are about hitting revenue and constantly being pressured by hitting numbers or succeeding in some fashion. You just, you don't see that in corporate America anymore. So I think that is another reason why a lot of younger people are just going back to the heritage of this country, right? Which is I want to be an entrepreneur.  Yeah, it's totally, it's like our parents, right? They all came to this, you know, this country and, you know, my mom was a gas station owner. Your parents did a lot of hustling. And at the end of the day, they learned how to develop their skills and manage their businesses on their own. And they got help along the way. But I think, you know, I think people are going back to that now. Are you real quick? I gotta ask, as somebody who was in VC before there was memes about it and everybody knew what it was. And there was all these people, you know, having TV shows like Silicon Valley and stuff that often mentions VCs. Are you glad that the industry you're in is way more mainstream exposed now? Or you're like, I don't care. It was whatever, I'm in it. Yeah, or you're like, ah man, there's a lot of young BS's. A lot more competition, right? Yeah. No, I think competition is good. And I think more people who have access to venture capital is not only good for those companies and those founders, but it's also good for the economy at large. I mean, we're innovation-driven companies or country, excuse me. So, you know, I think that's what makes us really unique. So for our GDP, you know, our GDP cannot be constantly driven by existing resources and, you know, industries. They have to, you know, there has to be innovation, right? For jobs and growth. So I'm very happy that it's gone mainstream. The downside of it going mainstream as to what you guys said is people don't really know what it is and so it can get confusing. And then you have people who don't understand what it is. You start working with some of these founders and it could lead to a lot of kind of discussions and education. So I wish VCs would do more to educate founders in terms of the process and what it means. Like we're talking about today, but that doesn't really happen because at times people are really busy. And so you end up, I mean, I would say that's kind of one of the pitfalls. You have a lot of founders who don't know what venture capital is or what kind of the pressures that we're under. And because of the lack of that conversation or knowledge, you end up in situations where people have disagreements or misunderstandings. And I think, you know, what you guys are doing was really awesome, which is trying to get people to understand what venture capital is. I guess what is like a common misconception that a young founder has when they're interfacing with somebody like yourself? They'll get free money. That's not gonna happen.  They're like, oh, and then they like, try to pitch you and stuff like that. Is that not the right thing to do? No, it's fine to have enthusiasm for whatever you're doing. But I think there's this misnomer that, you know, if you're talking to VCs, because keep in mind on the finance ladder guys, there's always different levels of financing, right? You go from traditional financing in the public markets to alternatives and banks with private equity, then you have growth capital, then you've got venture capital. And I think venture capital is kind of like the minority. It's kind of like the minor leagues, right? Of getting to the world series. So because of that misnomer, I think a lot of founders think it's the easiest place to start and you'll just get free money. When they don't realize that, you know, we still have to do some level of research. No, it's not as simple as, oh, this guy has access to money, or he's rich himself. Like, he's gonna give me, I have this cool idea. I think the passion is really, it's what gets you in the door. And it gets, you know, I think it gets us excited, right? Because it's innovation and ideas. I think where some of the early stage founders don't, you know, where they kind of misstep or they don't really get into the right groove is they also don't understand how, it's kind of like marrying your left brain and your right brain. They've got to go from the passion and the emotion of it into the analytics of it, and they've got to marry that really well so that even if you're not a revenue company and you have an idea, that there's some confidence that you'll be able to execute that idea, right? So venture guys like the gamble, right? I'll be honest with you about that because we don't really know, we only know what we know, right? We don't, you know, the- Right, when you're picking a company to- Exactly. Put a substantial volume of investment in. Yeah, yeah. That's your own money, other people's money. You just can do as much research as you can. Right, I mean at that early level, quote unquote early level, you just don't have enough metrics to, if any VC said they had enough metrics to de-risk that business, I would say that they're idiots. I think you just don't know, right? Well, because there's so many different ways to do venture capital, right? Like if it's a big firm, like we've talked before, sometimes they'll invest in a whole bunch of companies and then just hope that a couple of them become unicorns, right? And blow up and explode and become these great big like, kind of like, I don't want to say lucky winners, but you know, winners of them all, but maybe for your guys' firm, you guys invest in less companies, right? Like there's different ways to do it. Yeah, our model is, we're much more selective. So we'll invest in early stage companies on that spectrum of pre-C to series F. But, you know, we'll also disproportionately put in numbers into later stage companies that have more metrics that are a little more stable so that we can return the fund. Is there a couple early stage companies that you're pretty proud of how they turned out? Like, you guys personally? Yeah, I think, you know, it depends on what you describe as proud, right? But I mean, we were pretty early with companies like Airbnb and Pinterest. We've made late stage investments with companies like SpaceX. When it comes to pre-seed seed companies, as you guys know, we've been involved in things like Snorble and Flexfrost and a whole host of different companies across different sectors. But, you know, going back to your original kind of thought process on the spray and pray model, I think, yeah. I think that, like, at the end of the day, because you don't have metrics that early, you're really believing in the idea and you really have to be passionate. So that passion comes through. We love the founders for that.  And there's a lot of factors in that. So, you know. Is it based off their Shark Tank presentation or is that just for TV? Like, is it that they don't make you pitches like that or they do? Yeah, are the pitches from companies, are they presented like Shark Tank? Do they have like this great big PowerPoint? I'm sure they have PowerPoints. Oftentimes they're wearing some sort of outfit and have a billboard behind them. Hey, so what we've been doing the past six months. You know, I think that most of the founders, you know, when they pitch to us, they have presentations and they kind of go through it. But I think what I love about Shark Tank is that they're under pressure to really summarize their ideas. So when you're not under television or the spotlight, you might have 30, 40 minutes to go over everything. And you can make mistakes. You can kind of dry if you have to be. Yeah, and you could be, it's pretty casual. And, you know, you have the opportunity to express yourself in different ways. I think on Shark Tank, what makes it really interesting is that they're made to summarize their entire business in less than like 10 or 15 minutes, which is really difficult for a lot of people. They turned all these founders that could be not even extroverted personalities at all into like the oxy clean guy. Dude, yeah, totally. Or like QVC or something, right? Like they're just trying to pitch, pitch, pitch. Like imagine if we started a company and someone said you have two or three minutes to give me, you know, the who, what, why, where and give me the, you know, go from 50,000 square foot down to like an inch on your business. I mean, that's a pretty difficult pitch. Real quick, I wanna switch gears a little bit and I wanna talk about the little guys because I know that legendary, obviously you guys have invested in companies that everybody in household names that everybody knows now, but now there's obviously a lot of companies that are on the smaller side where I think maybe a lot of people are thinking, oh venture capitalist, that sounds like they're only dealing with $500,000 or a million dollars or $5 million, like what about the $10,000, the $25,000 investments? Do those exist in the VC world? And like how common are they and what do you guys as a firm, do you guys specialize in those or yes or no, I guess? Dude, that's a great question. I have so many founders who ask us what are average check size, right? For earlys are. Of the checks you're writing to give to a founder. You know, if you're an early stage company, what kind of check size do we write? I think that's the wrong way of answering it or the wrong question to ask because I think every deal is unique to the deal. So there might be early stage companies that deserve a quarter million dollars. There might be ones that deserve $25,000. It really depends on the cycle graphics and the relationship and how much you're enthusiastic about that founder, right? Because you don't have metrics and what you think that business can do. So unlike later stage companies where we have like a list of things that we go through to evaluate the company, when you're that early, you just can't get through that list. You know what I mean? So it comes down to people, it comes down to the idea, comes out things like addressable market. So for example, you know, if you're building the next generation AI tech that might have, you know, very broad consequences on the industry, I mean, that might deserve a bigger check simply because it might deliver a bigger return at some point. Is that something that- You can use it across a number of different issues. Yeah, you have more customers who could use it, right? But if you're building something that's like, you know, really small, that's very specific, you know, you might wanna put in a smaller check to see how it goes. But that's not to say that a very specific, focused, you know, company on a specific industry, for example, will do poorly. There's a lot of companies out there that fit a niche that become multi-billion dollar companies just because no one else can do it. So it's not an exact science. So I think in the early stages, you know, to your points, it really comes down to the people. And real quick, like, what about the types of business, like maybe a lot of people are interested in this space, but they're thinking, oh, they only wanna invest in tech because tech is so hot and big. But then like, you guys actually do packaged consumer goods, which is like, for example, Flexfrost, which is an ice cream brand, it's a healthy ice cream brand. This is something that a lot of people can start because the guy who started it young, he wasn't like a rich guy himself when he started it or anything like that. Yeah, I think this goes back to the notion of ventures, right? What does notion mean, like, what does venture mean? I think for me, venture for us means investing in entrepreneurs who'll build things that actually have some sort of a creative value. And it could be anything. It could be anything, right? But I think there's this kind of common general idea that venture is associated with pure tech, and that's not the case. Is that because of popular pop culture, like Silicon Valley and like Big Bang Theory or? I mean, I guess Shark Tank is more CPG, right? Consumer packaged goods, maybe, right? Cause I just seen they invested in those. Well, Shark Tank has to be CPG because like, what are you gonna show on television? You can't show AI. Right. How are you gonna show a blockchain on television? Does that make sense? Like it's completely conceptual, like, you know what I mean? And the audience wouldn't understand it, and they wouldn't wanna show that proprietary info out on the day, right? So I guess, yeah, you're right. But you're right that in people's minds, when they're hearing venture capital, they might think like angel investment is more CPG in an average person's mind, right? Totally. And then VC has to be tech. Yeah, we like a diversified portfolio. So we like, you know, we pretty much invest in anything that we think can actually grow and generate returns. And we, you know, there's different reasons why we like, again, it's all unique, but we like CPG businesses because at the end of the day, they're very asset heavy. You mean like they have real things, like real products. Real things, like real products. Well, they have inventory, they literally have warehouses full of this thing. There's no products like G Fuel, right? As you guys are aware of. So at the end, yeah, I mean, on the one hand that inventory and those assets is a blessing.  Because it requires more money to build that business. But at least you have something, right? You know, as opposed to tech companies that are very asset-light and that could pose, I mean, there's benefits and liabilities for both.  So when they fall, they completely fall. I mean, there's nothing to go after, right? In terms of recovering some benefits for their investors and their community. I feel like a way to look at it is like, and I think the way it sounded was that, oh, just because you write a small check to a company, that means you don't believe in them as much. But I think the point is like, the fact that you guys did all your due diligence, looked into their background and still decided to be like, yo, this is still worth something. Let's give you some money. That's a huge, that shows belief right there. Because how else can you show belief in a startup anything more than actually investing in them? Yeah, I think our culture is really unique in the sense that, to your point Drew, we don't wanna just give checks out for the sake of giving checks. What we wanna do is we wanna back a really great founder and we wanna grow with them over a period of time. So to your point, if we give them a $25,000 check, that doesn't mean we're not gonna give you a quarter million dollar check. We just kinda want you to grow and not get into a situation where you're so overwhelmed. Because growing is great, but growing too fast is also problematic, correct? You might not be able to scale to actualize some of those benefits and then you completely pancake in that. Yeah, sure. And real quick, before we get into a lot of the questions about like, oh, like, you know, diversity in VCs and Asians in the VC world, last thing I wanna ask is like, how about the VC to founder relationship? Can you shed some light on that? Because once you give me, let's say you give our startup $25,000, right? What is our relationship now? Are you like mentoring me? Are you helping me a lot? Are you helping me less? Or does it depend on your expertise as well? Yeah, I think, yeah, obviously mentoring and giving advice is part of it, but I guess there's two schools of thoughts on this, right? And I'll just be honest with you, bros. One school of thought is, okay, now that I'm an investor, my entire role is to basically play rah-rah, right? I mean, share this company on, right? It doesn't really matter what they do. I'm a complete supporter, you know, at least in terms of decisions and whatnot, right? Like a sports fan. Right, exactly, like a sports fan. The other school of thought is if you really wanna mentor and support the company, it's not just about the good, but it's also about the bad, so you wanna give them some constructive criticism. And I think that that's where then you see another layer of founders kind of drop off. I think that there is a group of founders who can handle constructive criticism, and those are the ones that you wanna really stick with. I think the ones that can't are probably not equipped at this stage in their life to really build a serious business, and that's just my personal opinion. All right, this gets me to one more point. There was a great segue of some people, maybe in your circle have called you the Gordon Ramsay of the venture capital world. My team, I don't know about anybody else. Why is that? Cause you seem so mild-mannered and nice in here, but like, I guess, and not that Gordon Ramsay's not nice, but he's super like, his temper's crazy. Yeah, I just try to keep it legit with the people that we work with. I don't wanna hold anything back. I'm a big believer. It's kind of like the way my mom kind of raised me. If you really love somebody and you really care about what you're doing, cause obviously we're not gonna give you money unless we actually believe in you. So do I really wanna be a cheerleader? No, would I rather just jump into a conversation and give them my direct, honest, kind of authentic opinion? That's great. Unfortunately, some people again can't handle constructive criticism, and that's not to say that I'm negative or I'm trying to downplay something, but what I'm trying to do is, this goes back to like culture, right? Like I think 20 years ago, I certainly grew up during a time when mentorship and tutoring and supporting was more synonymous with individuals kind of growing up and learning how to do things on the fly, right? I think this generation at times is really more about, okay, I don't get it, so let me go and help you do it, and then I've learned from it. So there's a lot of different vectors here, but in my opinion, I'd rather just go and like legit tell them exactly what they're doing right or wrong, and if they don't like it, they could just off, or they could just do it, but at the end of the day, it's their decision. You're about keeping it direct. Yeah, yeah, totally. You're not trying to hurt people's feelings, but you're not trying to spare people's feelings. Yeah, I think it's the greatest form of love and care when you could be honest with somebody and tell them, hey, look, privately, these are the things that we feel or I feel or whatever it might be, or the things that are gonna help you become successful. And the difference is a lot of the times when friends are critiquing other friends, that friend that's critiquing isn't coming from a place of more experience or higher knowledge or a position of power or leverage, but you're coming from this place of being like, listen, we already did the research on you guys, we want you to succeed, we're hoping you to succeed, so when I tell you and criticize you, you know right off the bat, there's no way I'm trying to break you down. I care. I think this mentality and the style is also kind of determined on the VC background, right? So if you're a VC who only worked in the finance business, then obviously what else are you gonna say other than, hey, your numbers look like this, maybe you should be doing these things and we love what you're doing. I think if you're a VC that comes from an operating background, so a lot of us at my company at our firm, excuse me, they're entrepreneurs and previous startup guys who've exited businesses, when you have that operating experience and you translate that, I think it's a different experience if that makes any sense. Like so I don't view myself necessarily as an investor when I invest in a company per se, I think I'm kind of like a fellow founder working alongside them.  So if we were working together, I would want to be honest about the things that we really need to do to really make some progress versus just showing up and saying, oh, here's the great things that you're doing. Oh, you can kind of improve some of these things now. Talk to me in a couple months. Is there a pretty big variance in the way that VCs like talk with their founders?  No, I actually think it's the opposite. I think most VCs are very hands-off, right? I mean, I don't know what percentage, I don't have the statistics, out of the 1,000 VCs globally, probably about six or 700 in operating in the Americas, I don't know what percentage of them are actually operators or former founder operators or that have any type of operating experience, but it'd be fair for me to guess that it's fairly low, right? Most of these fund managers at VC firms are coming from financial institutions, they have MBAs, they went to Harvard, whatever, and they've never built a business. They've never exited a business, they've never gone through the crying at nights, you know what I mean, and all this kind of stuff, so I think that they're probably simply gonna say good things to these founders, like for example, if I wasn't in, we were not investors in FTX, but that would have probably been a different type of conversation I would have with Sam versus probably a lot of their other VC firms that probably just said a lot of great things to them, right? Because you're killing it. Right, because at the end of the day, all they care about is making sure that their investment is being marked up, but and that's another thing, right? So in the VC game, is the value of your investment based on something that's marked up, meaning you see how it goes up in the private markets in terms of value, or do you see your value in terms of how much you generate actually, right? In cash, back to your investor. So if you look at FTX, I mean, I'm sure all the VC's were talking great to him, like he was the next white Jesus, but at the end of the day, right? Because they were getting the markups, but at the end of the day, it pancaked and they had to write off the entire investment, so I wonder how they, so I don't know if that's necessarily a good relationship. I'd rather, it's like dating. So you're basically saying that these founders, they need the Gordon Ramsay of VC. Yeah, dude, I think, that you're an advocate for your own style. Yeah, because I think it's the most genuine and honest.  They want to help them out. Right.  They're going to get some Jason Kim loving. Jason Kim's going to straighten you out. Yeah, some tough loving. Yeah, they're going to get some tough loving, like tough Asian bro loving.  Like, is it, do you just see it in them? Or are you judging there? Yeah, can they like email you? I'm not saying that everybody should email you, but I guess like how do they even get to that point where they can feel confident to present it to you? Or that you guys will even take their presentation, you know what I mean? Yeah, I, you know, first of all, anybody can email us or contact our partners. I mean, we do get a lot of deal flow. So I mean, we look at as much as we possibly can, but I will tell you, it's interesting for me, one of the attributes that I look at when I, when I hear pitches are people who understand why their businesses are problematic versus great. So like, I'll tell you, bros, in the 10 years I've been doing this, I can't tell you how many times, you know, companies and founders have pitched this and all they do is talk about how great their opportunity, the company is, their business idea is, what the opportunity is. It's very rare for me to meet a founder that'll be honest and humble and say, look, I've got this really great concept.  I need a little bit of help and hear all the problems that I have. I don't know how to fix some of these problems, but if you can, then maybe we can make a good team. I admire people who say that because it's very, it's not part of the natural human condition for us to say the things that we're not good at. But I also believe that's with merit because if you know what you're not good at, then you know you could fix that and become great. And I just think that that's not something in the, like, you know, in the community, it's not culturally, I don't know why, but I think there's a lot of kids today who are just afraid of saying it. It's like, well, I think it might come. Everybody kind of knows their weak spots, but whether they're willing to vocalize it and point it out versus you guys like actually doing the due diligence and being like, oh, now I found this. Yeah, I feel like it comes from the culture of sales, kind of. I'm not saying that there's nothing wrong with sales. I mean, we all work sales jobs at some point, but like, it seems like a lot of people, they just want to sell it hard. And they're just like, this is great. This is great. Here's why. Look, I'm cool. I'm smart. I came from this in this school. But that mentality works if you're selling a product or a piece of software, right? If you're trying to get investors to help you, the partner to build a business with you over a 10-year period, it's like dating. You've got to be honest with them, right? It's not a wham-bam thank you, man, right? Like, I'm not going to go take them out for drinks and then the next two days, we're getting married. Well, you don't want to, you got to get to know each other and be like, hey, look, this is my strengths and weaknesses and are you in with me or not, right? Are we doing this or not? And it's just, that doesn't occur, right, in bitches. So you guys, right, a VC relationship with a founder is not a hook-up, it is a marriage. Yeah, totally. There's no way it could be a hook-up, right? But the problem right now is that in the community, I think for the last couple of years, before the economy got really bad, everybody was just doing hook-ups, right? That was the VC ecosystem very hard. Right, there was Tinder, but you were just doing hook-ups. But that was partially because it was a bull market and everything was going good. Totally. There was money flowing, so then people were like, oh, this is fun, this person sounds cool. I'm gonna, and then the hook-up culture really infiltrated the VC culture that is totally. Totally, yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh. But I don't think you can, I mean, but to me that's, you know, it's just not a long-term type of relationship that could work, right? Because every VC knows that if you invest in a company, it's going to take six, seven years to get at, minimally, to get out of that investment. So that's a marriage to me, guys. It's not a hook-up. All right, moving on to the last section of this talk, because it's been, I feel like it's been so even insightful, even to us, even though we've had conversations with you about this before, it's even like hearing all the new analogies and things like that. But I guess maybe by now some people are wondering, like, why are we sitting down talking with you? Like, how are the Fungbros involved in all of this and what does this all mean as far as like our relationship? Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things that's really interesting about you guys is you're just not, you know, kind of in entertainment and media, right? You guys are entrepreneurs who have like very strong relationships with kind of this next generation of innovators in the community. And so, you know, our firm thought it was really interesting. First of all, I love you guys to death, right? We're all bros. Two, you know, our firm is one of the few, I think minority-led firms as a senior partner at the firm. We have a lot of Asians in venture capital at various levels. And three, you know, the combination of the two, I thought was a really good idea to work with guys like you just so that we can help, you know, a kind of upcoming Asian entrepreneurs in the industry. Thank you. Well, you know, it's been really dope to be a part of it and it's like a whole new world open up to us. And interestingly enough, there's not a lot of Asians in VC, but there actually are a lot of Asian founders, right? Totally, yeah. So explain to us why maybe it seems like that there's a lot of Asian starting businesses, starting companies in tech, et cetera, et cetera. We know this, but not as many Asian venture capitalists and why that may be. Or maybe we don't have to only narrow it down to Asian. I mean, just maybe minority in general, you know, like why there's not as many minority VCs out there. On the capitalization side, right? There's building apps and whatever this and that. Right. I mean, that's a really interesting question. I do think at a macro level, there are a lot of Asians in the community on both sides of the ecosystem, both on the capitalization side to your point, as well as founders. In terms of penetration, meaning why don't we see more high end Asian VCs that are very publicly known? Is that what you're kind of asking? Or early stage founders that are making it to unicorn status. I just think it's just an evolution of our race, right? And kind of going from being the typical, stereotypical Asian who just works hard all the time. Right, STEM job, whether it's a doctor or a lawyer or whatever it might be. Which there's nothing wrong with. But that is kind of like art. You were a lawyer actually. Right, yeah. But it's breaking out of that stereotypical rule of being good, quiet, smart Asians and going back into entrepreneurialism and then finding a voice in that entrepreneurialism, if that makes any sense. It's very difficult for Asians to go and say things that they feel that's sometimes even on their chest, right? Because it's our culture to be very respectful. And to, you know what I mean? We internalize a lot of things. Yeah, exactly. Whereas other people they send to externalize it. Yeah, exactly. We're not FOMO, right? We're more about to some degree, and I'm not saying that I'm not making a judgment on any other particular race, color, religion, creed or whatnot. But I think Asians specifically are really known for being very practical, being very, very execution focused. You know, we don't like a lot of attention and we just like to work hard and get things done. And I don't know if that necessarily mixes with the VC culture, right? Where you have hundreds of startup kids running around the West Coast, screaming me, me, me, me. Would you say that the VC culture is very American in a way? Like if we're trying to draw it to how a lot of us are raised by immigrant kids. So if your parents are immigrants, no doubt you have some of that culture in you, right? And you operate under that. A lot of us have taken trips back to Asia. So maybe some of us has worked in Asia. But I guess like, is it possible to say like the VC culture, because it's so strong in America that it is very American based. It's very confidence driven. It's very like being outspoken, which just drives almost sometimes it feels like opposite to traditional Asian culture. Yeah, I think this goes back to, you know, if you look at the VC ecosystem in the world, clearly America is a very industrialized, mature economy for it, right? Going back to what we said earlier, America is the greatest startup in the world. So that lives in our culture, lives in our heritage, lives in our spirit. I think that's starting to rub off on other countries that are now coming into an industrial age. Right, right, right. Maybe there are a couple of decades, a century behind or whatever, right? But yeah, I mean, if you look at China, there's amazing group of entrepreneurs. But that system's gonna be a little bit different than America, right? There I think there's gonna be more of an attention to, especially in South Asia, to executing things, right? It's not gonna be about, it's gonna be what I'm essentially saying is that it's less about ideas and it's more about the business operations, right? And the execution. I do think in this criticism I think of America is that in the current ecosystem, we have a lot more ideas than execution in this environment. Could we use this analogy and you judge this analogy for me, that Asians in America, as far as like being VCs go, we're like in the early stage. Like what stage would we be at? Yeah, it's not pre-seed. No, no, no. I'd probably say we're like, you know, seed. Does that make sense? I don't know if we're a priest. I wouldn't say that we're, you know, pre-A or at the A. So Asians as a company. I guess one thing I wanted to bring up, because you know, your mom ran a gas station, right? Totally, yeah. I guess a lot of Asians that I know that are even second gen, they're still sort of locked in that mindset of like, I'm gonna get rich just owning 10 gas stations. Whereas you actually transitioned into this very like high-end field of VC. Like what made you do that rather than just owning like 30 gas stations? Because you know, you can make a lot of money doing that too, but it's all very like nitty gritty. Yeah, so if I'm gonna be a little self-reflective, I think my mom is actually a lot, my parents were a lot more successful than I was. Because they had a lot less resources and they were able to build a business and generate revenue, right? And take care of a family that was totally new. It was incremental, right? They didn't get help in doing that. Whereas I think in my generation, I had some level of resources available to me, right? Going to a better school or getting a job or doing this or doing that. I think the current generation, you know, has more of those resources. So if anything, you know, I think, you know, I hope that the entrepreneurialism in this country can equate to execution because, you know, you're seeing a lot of other international companies where kids are just executing now, right? And here, this country sometimes is more about ideas and FOMO than it is about execution. So you're running into the risk where we might lose, America might lose some of our competitors, right? Because you have other countries that are just coming into age. I guess for anybody that wants to like pitch you an idea, what should they do? They can email us.  We've got questionnaires on our website so just we can get to know you up front, right? Typically when information comes into us, you know, our team, we have an early stage team that'll look at it and evaluate it. You know, I see them all the time. So I just kind of do, you know, not to spray and pray, but you know, if something strikes me as interesting, I'll jump into it. So there's kind of misnomer that the senior partners never look at early stage companies as false. I look at things randomly all the time, excuse me, all the time. And then if we like them, we'll schedule a call and we don't really care what their backgrounds are. We want to get to know who they are. I guess advice for any, not just young, but anybody out there who's like, yeah, I'm starting this business and man, I could really use some funding. I think I'm good for, I guess like just general advice for them. Yeah, my first advice is that if you're a first time entrepreneur, not a second time or three time, you know, founder, you know, with some sort of track record, it's probably best to build the business as long as you can without venture money. Okay. Yeah. I know that sounds crazy guys, right? So don't seek investors as the first thing of your first business. Why? Is it because you're gonna give up so much of your company? Is it, well, you might not even get the investment anyways. Well, there's a couple reasons. One is if it's your first time, you actually want to learn through the process, right? So it's not like you're taking a job at Corporate America somewhere or someone's mentoring you. But Jason, Jason, I don't want to learn. I just want to make money. Yeah. I want to grow. Well, you can't make money unless you actually understand how to operate your business, right? So first, some of it is just learning intensive, right? Because it's your first one. The second part of it is that it's not really even about other investors making money. You just want more, I think, freedom and less stress of operating your company, right? You know, if you get investors, it's not that they're gonna be critical. I think when you have investors, you have another layer of stress, which is you're not just building your own business, you're also worried about what you could do for them, right? Or how they're perceiving you. So, you know, imagine going to college and it's not just you having to make your parents happy, but you're also now making your uncles and nieces and aunts and cousins, you know what I mean? There's just too much expectation and too much pressure. Finally, I think that financially, if you could build your business to a stable revenue and profit, the longer that goes, the more you'll actually see in return and personal wealth, right? So in this country, you can't really build a better socio-economic life for yourself unless you actually have some returns, right? So there's this big argument, is it government in public policy that makes your life better, is it kind of the social entitlement welfare environment that can effectuate your life or is it, so I'm a big believer that it's through economic development that you could really become prosperous, right? And have a say in this community. So I just think that first-time founders should go as long as they can without venture capital. It doesn't really matter. Loans, whatever it might be, because I think the longer they go, the less pressure they have. They can grow on their own terms and when they do exit, they might end up with a little bit more money. You know what I mean for themselves. And by exit, you mean like maybe sell their company. Sell their company or even get investments later in the stage of the company, right? Because if you take investment early on, you're giving up larger chunks of your company. Correct, right. If you do it later, you'll probably give up less of it. But, you know, so it comes down to stamina, right? And again, how much do you believe in your company, right? If there's some serious founders out there who believe in it so much, you know, they'll go, they won't take a penny from anybody. I mean, you've seen those guys before, right? You guys are independent entrepreneurs. You guys don't take in a lot of investments. You guys do the same thing. And then there are people who are less passionate or less maybe, you know, they might believe in their businesses less or they take more money up front. But again, I'm not making a judgment. In this particular case, again, it depends on the type of company that you're trying to build.   Can you give us any insight on the wackiest idea that you ever heard? Because a lot of people probably are like, yo, man, you get to see everything. You get to see good ideas, medium ideas, some horrible ideas. How about wackiest idea that you even looked at and like gave some thought? Yeah, the only thing that comes to mind because there's so much to go through, but great question. I saw a company that actually built years ago, a woman's, this is obviously we invest in tech, but this was a hybrid and a CPG business. They built a woman's heel with transforming heels and things like that. So it's kind of a thing. You mean a high heel shoe and the heel changes colors? Yeah, the shoe changes from a heel to a flat, right? Like a transformer. It's basically a transforming shoe. So I thought that was kind of interesting.  Are there any businesses that you know of that you guys totally passed on that ended up doing really well? Like smaller business that you're like, ah, I do regret that. Or I should have seen that. Or honestly, no, they got like, I couldn't have seen it coming. Yeah, I mean there's, I don't know.  I don't know if I regret any investments in terms of exits, because a lot of the companies keep in mind at a venture firm we have a tenure horizon. And so something I regretted eight years ago still has not gone liquid, if that makes any sense, right? So I don't know, you know what I mean? But I do, you know, I think the only company in recent times that I regret was probably, you know, the Chinese EV company, I think it's called Polestar. Yeah, yeah, so we had an opportunity to get involved with them a number of years ago and I didn't think that they would do so well, right? In the electric vehicle market and they've done pretty well, right? They've, you know, since then they've gone public, they've grown, they're maintaining their market capitalization. So they're doing pretty well, right? So that's one that I was like kind of surprised by because that was an international company. You know, but there's been plenty of companies that we've passed on that have marked up and done really well in the private market, but it remains to be seen, right? I mean, if you look at a lot of the hot companies in the last five years, you know, they've all kind of done well going up and then all of a sudden at the end, when people really need to cash out and make money, they've all pancaked, like we work, you know what I mean? All of them, right? Right, right, right. They're in that really interesting class of companies that are really great at fomoing, you know, financial investments, but you know, when the rubber hits a row and they've got to hold their own, right? In terms of the big event. When it came time to give birth. It wasn't. It was a C-section and it was difficult. All right, man. I think that that's actually a good place to stop because I think, and for anybody who's made it this far in the video, I think there's so many more videos to make and I think there's more videos to make with other VCs, other founders, other people. So we're probably gonna end it right here. All right, I got one last question for Jason. Because I know, Jason, this is probably the calmest I've ever seen you. Would you ever do a show where you're the Gordon Ramsay adventure and then like have that be more, you know what I mean? Like for the world to see versus just for a small. I've always thought it would be interesting to work with you bros on not, the thing about Shark Tank that I love is that, you know, it puts people under the gun, right? It's like, it's so pressure packed. They got like 15 minutes to, which is not enough time to explain what they're doing. And then someone just says yes or no. I think it would be interesting is to work with you bros or somebody for us to actually engage founders and go through the process of negotiating a deal so people can see what that's actually like. That would be kind of crazy, right? So like, that should be our next episode.  And then we all talk to them and we figure out how to make a deal together, right? That to me is interesting. But part of that is you, what, ripping into them and I don't know if I'm bearing love. You guys are making me really like.  You didn't really get to show that side today. Yeah, because we're just hanging out as bros, right? Talking about this stuff. But I think that would be kind of interesting, right? Which is you're putting a founder under the lens but at the same time you're testing his abilities to show his strengths and weaknesses. And to me, like I said, Shark Tank is interesting because it's a yes or no coming out to some degree. I think life isn't so simple as yes or no. You got to get through the process. And I think a lot of founders are curious about what that's like, right? I have so many founders who are always asking me, if I pitch to you and I get to know you, what is your process like? And the truth is that there's actually no clear answer to that process. It's just a mixed bag of nuts. I'm a big believer that almost every founder in this country could get funded if they find the right people and they engage them the right way. Does that make sense? Okay. Wow, you're kind of saying. You're giving it a lot of hope. Yeah, you're saying everybody has a soulmate out there. It's just a matter of... It's like, it really comes down to the details, right? If I engage it, yeah, exactly. If I engage a founder and I really like them, it's never a no. That's what they don't realize. It's how do we make it a yes. And can we work together to make it a yes? And if we can't, and you're not willing to play that game or you're not capable of doing it, right? Or having that discourse, then you know, it's always gonna be a no, right? Right, right. Because at the end of the day, investing is something the founder is giving up some equity for the cash influx and the knowledge influx and the network influx, right? All right, everybody, we're gonna wrap it up right there. That was our first episode of Upside Mindset with Jason Kim. This is a new series. I mean, we've had other episodes of Upside Mindset, but as you know, this is the series where we talk about business. We talk to successful individuals or people who are trying to become successful. People with some knowledge base. So hopefully you found that video very, very helpful and insightful because even knowing Jason, I still found this conversation insightful again and I loved it. So you let us know in the comments down below what you guys learned. Check out Legendary Ventures in the link down below and we just have so much more to talk about. But thank you so much for watching Upside Mindset. And until next time, everybody, we out. Peace.


The study examined parent support for policies to reduce unhealthy food and beverage marketing to children and adolescents, and identified racial, ethnic, and other socio-demographic characteristics that predict support. Parents agreed that food marketing negatively impacts their children's eating habits and supported food marketing-related policies. Perceived negative impact predicted support, with highest levels among Black and Hispanic parents. Finding suggests that families of color would welcome policies limiting unhealthy food marketing to youth in their communities, and issues of targeted marketing and disproportionate exposure to unhealthy food marketing by Black and Hispanic youth may be incorporated into campaigns to address food justice and health inequities in communities of color. This article was authored by Frances Fleming-Millisey, Jennifer L. Harris and Silu.


Well, the fall season brings a mix of weather conditions that can create hazards when it comes to visibility. And that's why some students at Northern Elementary School in Bemidji were invited to take part in a pilot safety program. As a way to kick off National School Bus Safety Week, a handful of students were each given a special flashing light as part of Bright Light Program. The purpose of the light is to help the bus driver locate students who are waiting for the bus. Bright Lights are just another way to help keep kids safe.  I know the state of Minnesota was interested in us, the Toward Zero Death Group was certainly interested in seeing, you know, how this was going to work out. The Bright Lights will be given to students who wait for the bus along high speed and high traffic volume roads. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


you shouldn't have to think about your disk allocation or disk storage, right? It should just scale with you and you should in fact pay for what you use. So that's actually what we do with timescale. Hi, this is Osupal Bhartiya and welcome to another episode of TFR. Let's talk today. We have with us Mike Friedman, co-founder and CEO of Timescale Mike, great to have you on the show. Nice to be here. I will talk a bit about a broader picture when it comes to data databases is that if you look at modern, it could be cloud native or Kubernetes word. Talk a bit about what are the challenges that folks are facing because folks have moved to when you look at Kubernetes Clarity production. Of course, it's very easy to get up and running. Historic is cheap. That working off course, the problem solved. But when it comes to data and databases, what are the major challenges that you see enterprises or even startup surfacing today? So if you think about where a lot of Kubernetes and different elastic services started out, it really started by the shift of how we want to build stateless applications. It was the next generation of how we build web tiered where that was focused a lot of times so you could spin up services, spin down services. And the key idea there was that they didn't need to worry about state because all that state was in our databases. But now we have the problem of we actually want to build now more robust and reliable databases. So you had all this infrastructure, which is great at building super elastic stateless services. But it didn't solve what are really the underlying infrastructure for building modern applications, which are databases. And so why does this happen? This happens because users and customers, whether or not our business or consumers are really demanding more and more from our applications. We want them to be faster, more engaging, more personalized. And what was great is that we have these big hardware trends, Moore's law and Criter's law and all these things that computer stores were getting cheaper. But the question is, how does that bring better productivity to developers so they could build better and more engaging applications? I think that's really what happened. You've seen this new age of very interesting databases and databases companies emerge. I think time scales are the greatest example of that. We're really thinking about how do we re-architect the database for modern applications? And so what do I mean by modern application? You know, it's data intensive. There's lots of ingest happening. There's events from your product and usage, metrics from device or sensors, other real-time data feeds. And then you want to build these applications that use all this data to provide live analytics or live data that's available to query immediately. This is not about BI reporting, which we thought about a lot of databases. That's often a different data team. This is about how do we enable developers who are building applications on top of this data? And so that's really what time scale focuses on. How do we, we're built, we think of ourselves as Postgres++, Postgres we are protected for modern applications. We make it easy, fast, scalable, worry-free and cost-effective. And so that if you really want to worry about, if you're today, you're trying to use Postgres or MySQL or maybe Mongo or other things and you're running into performance or scalability or cost reasons, that's how moving to time scale, again built on Postgres, but more for this modern applications and modern cloud. Now, if you look at, once again, databases, Postgres is a great example. I mean, most of these databases have been around for a very long time, almost all of them, these predate the cloud, cloud-native world. Talk a bit about what are the limitations that these databases don't have and once again, how time scale enters the picture and try to tackle some of those challenges. Yeah, so I think there's two aspects of it. One is, what is it about these database architectures themselves? Is that what we want? What assumptions do they make about the infrastructure when they were designed initially for running on a single server versus running in the cloud? And what about the workloads have changed? And because I think it's really all of those, it's that the deployment models have changed and the workloads have changed. And that's where time scale is focused. In fact, I think we're actually more unique compared to a lot of people playing in this space because we have teams that both extend the internals of the database as well as do a lot of really amazing engineering around the database and the infrastructure itself. So the interesting thing about a database, when we launch time scale, our launch blog post, this was 2017, is when boring is awesome. And what we mean by that is we started by saying, what about the cloud and it's stateless? We want a scale, but it sits on this database.  You don't really want to think about your database.  It's kind of like your Wi-Fi. Like if your Wi-Fi is amazing, you never think about it. The times you think about your Wi-Fi is generally when you're really unhappy with it. And so I think that's been this tension in this industry. It's like we have databases take a long time to get right. The thing that people say is it takes at least a decade to make a robust database because it's okay. You can get the first 60 or 80 or 90 percent right, but it's the last 10 or 20 percent. Every 99 to 99.9 bit of reliability takes another order of magnitude of effort because it's all the long corner cases. And so Postgres itself is a database with its roots back in the 1980s or 1990s and academic work, but it's really been an amazing community effort of millions of person hours of work to get to the stage it is. And of course it's built very general purpose and because it's so community driven, it's by construction very general purpose because it really wants to run anywhere. It wants to run on a Raspberry Pi, in your old rack, in the cloud, whatever. And they make various decisions about they want to generalize it when as kind of a timescale where we focused on offering a managed offering, we could become much more opinionated for the type of deployments and the type of use cases that we're focusing on. So coming back to what I talked about with a modern application, one of the things we noticed is we started, we call this time series, but it's really much more broader than that. It's time series, it's events, it's analytics, where you have these streams of data. Well, there's different ways you'd even construct data structures inside your database if you're looking at workloads that are append mostly as opposed to workloads which are constantly updating the same records again and again. And so while we build on top of Postgres, some of our core has implemented what's called as an extension, but really we have hooks throughout the Postgres software that we line a layer on top of that. So we support all of what Postgres does, that's why I call it plus plus, but then all add all these new capabilities designed for what these type of modern applications are. Do this automated partitioning that's transparent. We have this amazing native compression, this hybrid row columnar storage, soon vectorized execution, these things of, you query the same thing again and again. So we build up what we call continuous aggregates which are basically materialized views that are constantly kept real time based on any changes you make to the database. All which is again how you serve modern applications. So I say that by saying you take this amazing thing that people work trust with all their production workloads and then you build on top of it and extend it for the type of use cases that people are trying to build today, especially those that are customer facing, as well as in type of cloud environments which we hadn't had before. As you're saying that developers should not get overwhelmed with things like databases, in general, these developers should focus on writing business application and should not have to worry about a lot of this plumbing, there's the whole idea of the cloud in the beginning, and you know what, we can take care of your lab stack, you don't have to worry about debuance or sent away as a rel, you just focus on that. But now if you look at Kubernetes or cloud, you're spending most of your resources on actually managing them then actually focusing on business application. I totally agree. And let me give you an example. Like, and you think about something like RDS, RDS is really like, it was just a lift and shift, lift and shift, right? They took Postgres, they just run it in a VM and that's kind of what RDS is. And some of the things that we're doing in the cloud, for example, is that, you know, you shouldn't have to think about your disk allocation or disk storage, right? It should just scale with you and you should in fact pay for what you use. So that's actually what we do with timescale. Like, we worry about making sure that you have enough storage underneath, but you know, you just write as much data you need. And in fact, I talked about compression before, you know, we see crazy numbers of 90, 95% compression on our data because we use actually algorithms designed for, you know, the types of data. If you have, you know, we were actually compressing different types of data differently to get those amazing rates.  And another thing that we just, for example, launched again, this is what you could do when you're cloud focused is that if you think about this data that you're constantly writing into your database, you know, you probably use the recent stuff a lot, you probably query it a lot, you probably even update it. As the data starts getting older, especially maybe your data from a year ago, you still want it around to build analytics on top of, to be able to occasionally do ad hoc queries against, but you're probably not changing it too quickly. So in timescale, we allow you to transparently tier that across, you know, fast SSDs as well as S3. That's all transparent to you.  You don't actually think about that. But under the covers, we take your SQL queries. Some of that get executed in main memory on standard disk. Some of that gets transparently pushed down into S3. And again, it gives this bottomless management experience for the developer where they just get focused on their business applications and let all that, leave that all that complexity to us, but then reap some of those cost savings that we're able to pass on as well. As you're talking about some of these databases, they predate a lot of these cloud and technology, but a lot of new technologies, new databases, they have emerged in, which are like born in the cloud native word. Of course, we have started talking about Kubernetes in production like one or two years ago. Talk about somehow those databases, which, you know, once again, like at the very early stages, like you're also one of the biggest differences between application and databases is database or data is the actual asset of a company. Application can go and come back, you know, but the data, that is what the most critical piece there, and that's why it's important. So talking a bit about when looking at some of those latest technologies, what are the risks associated with them? Because once again, when we talk about cloud, we are not talking about a stateless workload. We are talking about stateful workloads.  You know, when we have customers where, when we stop, you know, we serve gaming companies. If our database isn't available, the game stops working for their millions of users. We serve IoT and manufacturing companies. If we're down, their manufacturing line actually stops. And so you can imagine that you need to, you need to really care about operations and stability, not only just the database and how we engineer, but, you know, we have supported ops in APAC and EMEA in North America, because we practice, you know, around the clock follow the sun models of all of our cloud infrastructure. But back to your question, you know, when we think about that, I started by saying when boring is awesome. And, you know, it takes a long time to build a mature database. And I think that was something that was somewhat unique about our approach is how do we make it Postgres Plus Plus as opposed to this, I think, false dichotomy, which says that either you have to use the old option, which is not modern, doesn't fit modern needs, or you have to start from scratch and build on top of a really nascent technology. And I think when you start from scratch, you know, you could build some early performance results that look good, but I think those solutions generally lack the maturity and stability and, you know, operational maturity and tooling and developer tooling and developer ecosystem as well established options. You know, I think lately you start seeing a lot of companies who become, you know, Postgres wire format compatible, but all that means is they speak a network protocol. That says nothing about their internals where it takes years to actually, you know, iron out those details. And so I think that leads to a lot of unexpected bugs, performance issues, even data loss that potentially disrupts business operations. And I think it's also that, again, it's not just the risk, it's that with a lot of newer databases, the problem with all infrastructure, it's that, you know, people share the same 60, 80% of use cases, but you always have that last 20%. And the problem is everybody's last 20% is a little bit different. And so it's really that amount of maturity that, you know, time scales through Postgres that we get this breadth of features and functionality that is powerful for our users, not just when they start, but as they scale their, you know, their business and their applications as they want to do more and more with their database.  It leads to perform, you know, engineering productivity over time and also helps kind of reduce business risks when you could kind of modernize something like, like an amazing database like Postgres. Why Postgres? Let me start by saying is like, you know, I'm, that was one bet that we were so confident of when we started. And I actually think if you look at the trends over the last five years, there's all these metrics. It actually is that Postgres, this database that started late 80s, early 90s, that is actually today like almost the fastest growing database. And it has really caught this, you know, reemergence as the database that I think developers are going towards. So I think that decision we made when we started about, you know, six, you know, six, seven years ago, that is totally one that I'm very happy we made. And it was never really came in doubt.    You know, there's no free lunches.  But really, it's the power of SQL that we found really important. In fact, the backstory of timescale is when we started out, we weren't initially a database company and focusing on time series. We actually are building a platform for IoT for sensor data. And as you can imagine, IoT generates a lot of sensor data, which is time series. And we initially were looking at some of the open source offerings that offer time series databases, and some offered, like, you know, metrics. I'm going to store my device metrics. But what's important about your data is not just your metrics, but also information about the devices generating them, the business data, the metadata around those metrics that are emerging. So what we had to do, in fact, what we also hear a lot of customers who are using these not relational offerings, like Postgres, but other things, is they deploy both a time series-only database and a relational database, like Postgres. And then what you realize is whenever you want to answer questions, you need to move those joins to application space. So if you want to ask new questions about your data, you can't just query your database. You need to deploy new application code that then pulls this data from two different databases and then joins it in application space. So not only is that bad for performance, it's bad for productivity. It's operationally complex. And so the reason we actually started building Timescale, TimescaleDB on Postgres is it solved those needs. It gave us the SQL we want. It gave us the performance we want. It gave us that operational simplicity. And it basically stored both our time series events and analytical data, as well as our business and metric data. And we see that across basically all of our customers as well. As we are talking about these databases and technologies, I also want to talk a bit about the cultural aspect. When we look at, we talk about devos, disks or co-ops, sorry, spectrum engineering. A lot of disciples are there. A lot of processes are there. What kind of trend you're seeing when it comes to databases? You're like, hey, yes, we do need an organization-wide approach because once again, as you said, if the database is down or something goes, that's when everything is down. Or you're like, no, we don't need that. Companies, they are doing fine. Or you're like, no, developers or teams are looking at databases differently. Well, I think two things. One is not surprising. We view that kind of data is the life-flood a lot of these applications. So obviously care and maturity needs to be taken when building applications. Although I think part of the role of companies like Timescale is to hand a lot of that robust operations for users again so they could focus on their applications. But I think that one of the other trends that we see is that when people talk about databases, there's a lot of old terms that they use like OLTP and OLAP and HTAP and all of these things that are meant to describe the workloads. And some of those things became popularized, frankly, around because of benchmarks, like industry-standard benchmarks that existed DPCC and DPCH and all these things. But I actually don't think that's the right way to think about it. I don't think it's an OLTP workload or an OLAP workload or something else. What we see is that what really differentiates this is who the users are and what purpose that data is being used for. And so we see a big distinction between developers, often product teams, line of businesses, whatever you want to call them who are building applications a lot of times external facing, sometimes even internal facing, but they're building applications on top of a database. And that database has to be operationalized, operational, it's productized, it serves the core use of that data. And the opposite, which are often data teams or centralized data infrastructure, which you see more technologies like traditional data warehousing or data lakes or lake houses or whatever the amount of, there's also a growth there. But that is a way where you bring together all these disparate sources across your organization, some product data, some sales data, all these ETL jobs and to have a centralized view. But that is often used for things like reporting, analysis, now model training, but not really to serve and build applications on top of. And so when I think about that division, it's not about OLTP versus OLAP, because again, a lot of the data that serves modern applications are analytical in nature. It's part of the applications. But I think it's more about do you serve developers or do you serve data teams? And I think that is the type of division that we're seeing and different solutions are going to be done differently. For data teams, they often look for single centralized solutions that are used across the organization because the value there is with centralization. For product teams and for developers, they often have more flexibility that they want the best solution for the application that they're developing. So it could be that time scale is the best solution for a number of those while there are certain applications that even different parts of the organization's building where other databases are perhaps better suited for them as well. Can you share some use cases or users who are relying on time scale solutions? So we actually serve people across a really horizontal set of use cases anywhere from energy to financial and crypto to manufacturing and IoT, transport, logistics, gaming, music, security, observability. And so it's anywhere from the Fortune 500 like HP and Warner and other modern companies like Uber and Coinbase to kind of car companies like Northvolt renewable companies like building car companies like Lucid or renewables like Northvolt building the battery tech for Daimler and everywhere from gaming startups to IoT sensors and everywhere in between. So it's a great combination of major enterprises to the smallest startups. But again, the interesting about modern applications is you could have a 10 person startup dealing with terabytes of data. And so we have people come small companies bring gigabytes and small companies bring tens or hundreds of terabytes all in the interest of serving these type of modern applications. Mike, thank you so much for taking time out today and of course talk about time scale and of course some of the challenges that are there. Thanks for those insights and I would love to chat with you again. Thank you. Thank you for having me.


How to bake a cake, talking to developers, and scoping your Drupal project. My name is Danielle. I'm from Cold Front Labs. I'll get into my background a little bit later. Just a small little note, if you swing by the Cold Front booth, we are running a contest for Google Home. So if you want more information about that, come and see me at the end of the presentation and figure out how you can win that one. So I'm Danielle. I'm the communications coordinator at Cold Front Labs. Basically, a fancy way for saying that if it doesn't involve code, it ends up on my desk. So I'm not a programmer. I'm not a developer. I do everything, but honestly, I'd almost want to call myself a foreign explorer. I made a career change in the past year. I used to be a high school English teacher. I also worked in event management. I had a very small stint in IT for a political party, basically fixing printers. So this is not my field. And what's been really interesting is as I get into this field, seeing where communication barriers break down. I work with wonderful developers and web designers, but they speak a completely different language. And I've never been more certain of something in my entire life. The conversations that go on in my office, I only catch blips occasionally, and I'm getting better. But what I realize is I often come in the same place as the client or the organization. They're like, we need some help, but we don't really know. So they're trying to navigate this. And so I'm also trying to navigate it. So I'm a little foreign explorer into this world. So thanks for having me, guys. All right, you have a job.  If you do not have a pen or paper with you, because I realize I'm at a tech conference, please take out your phone or whatever. And I'd like you to Google pictures of cake and choose your favorite ones. So should I Google that? Google cake? No, we just have to Google them. Just like a real cake. This is the part. All right, now, turn to your neighbor. Have a little chat. Talk about if your cakes are the same. Do they look the same or are they different? Do you qualify a delicious cake in the same manner? Yeah. Now, cake gets people excited. All right. Odds are, you've all got things very different. So the way that we qualified delicious, the way that we envisioned our cake was all very, very different.  I want that cake to be three tiered with a one to two to two ratio. That's the high school English teacher. I want it to be vanilla cake inside. I want the bottom of the middle tier should have chocolate frosting with a caramel drizzle. Anywhere the caramel drizzle doesn't hit, I want it to have multicolored sprinkles. And the top tier should have a raspberry frosting.  Picture that in your head, right? You're probably all somewhere close to this.  So, the key to communication is, the key to success is communication. Now, I will get my lovely assistant, Melissa here, to start handing out cake because I wouldn't show you all these wonderful pictures if I'm making sure that you got something to eat. Mind the wrappers while I'm talking, guys, okay? I love that. So, talking to developers. What does cake have to do with websites? The entire concept is that when you're scoping out your website, you really just want to build a delicious cake. But how you envision that cake and how the developer envisions that cake might be different unless you actually talk about it and break down the specs. Now, that communication disconnect that I was talking about before, let's talk about why that happens. Developers are lovely, wonderful people who love what they do, but they live in their own heads. And I say that with a great deal of love. They're passionate experts who speak their own jargon. They list off acronyms and expect to know exactly what they're talking about. So be aware of jargon, and when you are chatting with them, stop them and ask them to break things down. They are experts, so they should be able to break down these acronyms for you, okay? Secondly, they know the trends. They know where the field is going. If they're pushing for you to do something in a certain way, it's likely because it's best practices. It's likely because that's where the field is heading. And they also wanna be really proud of what they build. I often see times where the client's like, oh, let's do it this way. And it's like, eh, I don't, not that I don't wanna do it that way, it's that this won't work for you in the best way possible. So you do have to sort of put a little bit of trust in there and that these people really know what they're doing. Now, here's the other thing that happens. When you're scoping out a website, you think, website, everyone's got one of those, okay? Same as when we bake cake.  Mix it all together, bake it, decorate with some icing. Voila, cake, right? That's simple. Here's what a developer thinks if he or she had to bake a cake. Where are you sourcing your ingredients from? Is anything coming from another country? How will the ingredients be transported to you? How do you plan to mix the ingredients together? By hand mixer, electric mixer, stand-up mixer, and the oven, what year was it manufactured? Is it convection? Actually, what is the heat source? Is that actually electric or gas? And any outstanding issues with your energy provider? It just keeps going because they are thinking about every little granular part of how this website for cake is going to function. So it's not that they're trying to talk circles around you, it's that these things matter and having answers to these questions are going to get you a better product in the end. Scoping your Drupal project. When you do, comes down to the five basic questions. Who, what, when, where, why, okay? And how we can throw in there as well, although it didn't fit at W. So when you're going to scope out your Drupal project, ask yourself why are we doing this, okay? And find a goal. So often it's why are we getting this because we need to have a website. Well, no, what's your aim? So one or two sentences about what this project aims to achieve. For cake, just to sort of set this up for you, the first purpose of a cake could be, I want the most epic cake ever. I want to impress people. That's going to be very different than a cake that's concerned with dietary restrictions. So they're different goals and they're going to be very different products. The same is the case when you're scoping a website. If your organization's goal is to expand your reach and create a platform for engagement, that's going to be very different than a website that wants to complete online transactions. It's not that these things are mutually exclusive and they're not going to happen on that same website, but what's the goal? What's the focus? What's the functionality that's going to be most important? Time and budget, okay? These always come up and they are the difference between the cake on the left and the cake on the right, okay? Be very clear about when you want to go live. We've had instances where a client organization wants this massive website with all this functionality and they're like, I would like it in 30 days, okay? That's not realistically going to happen. So making sure you have a clear go live date and it meets the functionality that you're looking to have, okay? Also, the big money ticket question, budget. I understand when you're going to a shop and you don't want to give them your budget, but give them a range, okay? So we know if we're talking about a $10,000 website, $20,000 website, $100,000 website, those are all very different things that when you're trying to get an estimate or a project scope down, it gives you a sense of, what can we realistically build here? What is it for? Who is your user base? So if we are building a website for kids versus for government clients, it's going to be very different. The same way that when you bake a cake for a birthday party versus a wedding versus the muffin Christmas, those are all going to be very different things. So we need to know about your user base. So telling us who's going to be visiting, not just your numbers, so often we'll get traffic, right? Which we do need to know, but who are they? How are they expecting to be engaged? It's going to have a huge impact in the way that the website is built. Functionality, okay? And this one I've titled where and how to start off.  I need to know if you are coming off of an existing content management system. Are you looking for a migration? Are we going to do it? Are you going to do it? Is someone else going to do it? User management, are you expecting people to log in? This is the one I see creep up a lot when people are scoping out a website and they'll be like, oh yeah, we wanted a calendar that everybody could update and put events in. Okay, then you need user management. People need to log in and be a identified user for that to happen. And that's a very different website than a brochure type website. How available does your website need to be? If there is a apocalypse, does your website still need to be up? Okay? Because there are instances in clients that has true. If it goes down and you have cash data, that's fine, great, okay? But we need to know what those expectations are going in, okay? How much traffic do you expect? Any third party integration? Is Drupal need to talk to anything? There's this assumption that we can make anything work because technology is so miraculous and wonderful but some things are easier than others. So putting those on the table right away is going to make your Drupal project go a lot quicker and better. Are there any technology restrictions? So what I'm talking about here is often you'll have an organization who is so accustomed to a certain platform. So for example, somebody we were just working with and we're like, we need a windows-based hosting solution. I know you guys love Linux, but it's not happening. So making sure you find somebody who fits into that integration is really important for both you and for the development team because you don't want to be butting heads about this the entire time. And hosting requirements, again, are we hosting it? Are you hosting it? Is somebody else hosting it? And the reason I bring up this list of questions is because often on calls with one of our developers and myself, and we start listing up these questions and they're like, I don't know. I don't know. And it's just before you go into those scoping meetings, having a conversation with your internal IT team to get the answers to these questions are gonna make moves move a lot quicker. Fancy functionality. These are like the bells and whistles. So if you think about your cake, this is like the candle, the fancy platter. If somebody needs to jump out of it, if it's chocolate, if there's gonna be sparklers. What are the things that the website is going to do? Is you don't want a website that does everything because that's just overwhelming, right? Is this something that needs to accept donations? Are you looking for advertising? Is blog really important? Or is it just this little sort of side project? So ask yourself, what does the website need to do to work best for our user base? There's a few givens that most people want, but sometimes you need to assess it for your content strategy if that actually makes sense. If you have a blog and you write two posts a year, probably don't need a blog, okay? So really assess what functionality you need going in. Don't just have a blog because everybody has a blog. And design. So developers, bake cake, they rarely decorate it, okay? They are the kings and queens of building really beautiful shells. And content and design can really fall by the wayside because it's kind of this, well, like it'll still work, but nothing will be there. And it's actually one of the most important parts. Branding and style guidelines. So putting up front what your style guidelines are. If you have a style guide, send it to us. That's wonderful. Even when we're scoping stuff out, even if we're just in conversations about an estimate, it gives us a clear sense of how much design needs to be done or doesn't need to be done, okay? You also want to establish who is responsible for these things. Is it internal or externally expecting someone on our team to do it or somebody on your team to do it going in? Web design, same thing. And also content authoring. Content authoring is another big one because you don't necessarily just want to dump all the content that you have on if no one's read it, gone through it, reviewed it. So again, is that happening with the development team that you're talking about or is it something that your organization is looking at doing? Also, if you're looking for a little extra help on your content and design stuff, our lovely colleague, Miss Melissa, who was handing out the cakes to you tomorrow, she's actually doing a presentation on choosing your logo colors and how that affects design and accessibility and all that stuff. So you can check that out Saturday morning if you are interested. Things to watch out for. So this is a little chat I had with our developers in-house and just things that they've seen keep up over and over again when scoping a project. This is a website scope we received, I think about six weeks ago, I'm not gonna say it's on Boo, obviously, but this was the scope. We got an email, it's like, hey, we're looking for a new website. And I'm actually gonna read this slide to you. I know it's like the cardinal sin in PowerPoint presentations to read you the slide, but this one's important. This is Ena. We want to design our current website. We design our current website. We require a more effective information architecture and a more versatile content management system. In addition to aesthetic appeal of the website, the new design must be accessible to all. It should be intuitive, engaging, responsive, adaptive, interactive, easy to navigate, mobile-friendly, fully searchable, and less time-consuming to update by staff and officers. With a newsfeed and an interactive calendar and email distribution and discussion group options as well as opt-in and opt-out procedures, the new design must simplify all communications with members. Could we get a quote? Thanks. Yes, we'd love to work with you. But this obviously caused a lot of back and forth with this potential client. And a lot of like, oh, we don't know. We're not sure. The person who knows that's on vacation. So it just, it really quickly wasn't clear. And this could be, for those of you in the room who do know, this could be a really small basic website, or this could be a massive entity. It's not clear. So really avoid the dumping everything into one paragraph. The next slide, this is better, still not great. But this is one of the places where bullet points can really be your friend. Because when a firm or an agency is going through to estimate everything for you, we literally go bullet by bullet and it's like, okay, that functionality will require this level of work and this is what we need to do it and it breaks everything down. So this is my slight rewrite of what they sent us. And you know, you have to flush out that goal. And I'm making assumptions here as the agency that perhaps are correct, but I'm taking my best shot. If the client or the organization actually does this, things are gonna be clear and we're not gonna have that disconnect in communication. And just, this comes right from the top owners of our company. These are really dangerous words that come up in scope meetings yet. They're these sort of off-handed comments where you're talking about how the web application is gonna be built. And it's just like, oh, we just need this. Oh, and this, okay? Functionality takes time to configure. Nothing just happens, okay? There's a lot of modules and code we need to get written to make that happen. So examples are, oh, and just a calendar for everyone to update. All right, just throw that on there, onto the website. When this could actually require user management, it could potentially require third party integration, things that are much more complex. Another one we had recently was, oh, we just wanna collect some feedback. Okay, is that a form? As I'm like, to fill out a form, is it a form, like a discussion form? Is, are there comments to the pages? What is your organization looking for? Cause those are all very different things. Additionally, do you wanna track data about the user's giving feedback? Do you need to know who they are, when they said it?  So these are all things that spiral and snowball very, very quickly. So coming in with clear expectations and ideas about how you want the stuff to function on your web application is really important. Stop worrying about Drupal 7 or 8. In every presentation that we've had recently with clients, it's like, so Drupal 7 or Drupal 8, which direction should we go? Or they'll come in and say, it's gotta be Drupal 8 cause it's new. Every time I've heard anyone on our team feel this question, it's like, let's see what your business needs are. Let's look at exactly what you want. Drupal 7 is stable, it's well supported, there's a lot of modules. It works great. Yeah. Okay, Drupal 8's getting there. Things will be there soon. But Drupal 7 isn't going anywhere. So if you want something that's stable right now, likely gonna recommend 7. We're looking for something a little more innovative. 8 might be the answer. But if you find a good development team, you should be able to trust them to make that recommendation for you. All right, that's your baker or your development team. So I don't wanna start a fight. Gotta be very careful with this one. But site builders versus developers. There are lots of projects that site builders are awesome at and they can build just fine. They're excellent at configuring Drupal as it comes. They're masters of that interface. But they typically don't have a full IT background. They may occasionally hack code, but they're gonna work with Drupal as it is generally. Okay, I'll hide behind the podium in case anyone's throwing at me. Developers, they're able to write custom code. They're able to write custom modules for you. And they're able to make Drupal talk to other web services a little more easily. No going into your project, how complex things are looking to be. And realize you might not have an IT background yourself going into it, but look at, are we looking for a sort of a run-of-the-mill content management system? Or are we looking for all these special functionalities that aren't typically done? And you're gonna be able to see, well, what do we need? Do we need a development firm that's mostly site builders with one or two developers? Or do we need a development heavy team that's going to be writing everything new for us or plugging it together in a different way? Lullabot has a really, really great podcast speaking to this, sort of giving you a little tidbit on what is a Drupal site builder, when are they really valuable, and when do you need a developer brought in? And they're very neutral about it, which is really nice, so you can check that out if you want a little bit of background going in. Last slide, I think I've talked way too fast, but that's fine. The last thing I'll say is, when you're going in for your project and you're starting to talk with different development firms, things that should be a given, or red flags to watch out for, responsive design should be a given, okay? If somebody's like, oh, we can cut down the budget and we'll just do it for desktop, right? It's like, that's a concern, okay? This is everything, it should be mobile-friendly, mobile-first these days. And I see some people smiling, I guess actually came up recently. So responsive design should be a given. AODA compliance, beyond compliance. You need to be working with a firm that has full usability in mind. We were recently at another conference where there was a really great panel where they talked about, yes, you can pass compliance tests, but if you actually have an individual who has a need, have a screen reader or something else, actually use it. Is it user-friendly? Is that an enjoyable experience for that person? So make sure that your firm isn't just shooting for compliance, that they're looking for full usability for any Ontarian or Canadian or whoever needs to access it. Multilingual experience, we're in Canada, okay? The vast majority of you do need bilingual websites and working with people who know how to navigate that more appropriately have a lot of experience in that. Drupal's great at multilingual, but ask them, you know, your websites in your portfolio, are they English, French, or English and any other language that they worked with? Code quality review. Are they looking at their code? Are they making new modules? Are they, you know, doing things on QA and prod, not just doing stuff directly to prod because that's also a concern? Making sure that they care about the code that they're putting together. And do they have a maintenance plan, right? We've had a couple instances of clients who've received websites and then the firm says, bye, have fun. And then we get the website a couple of years later and it's like nothing, no security updates, no nothing. So if you want to build a website or a web application, you need to go in knowing that there's gonna be costs to keep it updated and going and running smoothly. So what are their maintenance packages? What are their maintenance plan going forward for your website? So I think that's it. I probably talked way too fast, but I bribed you with cake, so that's why I'm here. So that's my spiel. Any questions? I'm okay with that. Come up and chat with me, otherwise, go hang out. Go have some water, there's no food. But just go, hang out, have a good time. Bye, guys.