Is it hard to make friends at uni? No. Everyone is nervous when they start university. My first day at uni, it was a bit hard because I didn't know anyone from a degree. For some people it's harder than for others. If you can make one friend, you'll be able to make more. What helped me a lot was going to orientation week. Be confident, show no weaknesses. And if you can find somebody more socially awkward than you are and sort of take them under your wing, that can be a really good way to make friends. Be bold and say hello and come up with a smile and you usually get a really good response.


My name is Joe Lim, Senior Partnerships and Innovation Officer at the World Federation of UN Associations. So after running a UN startup challenge called City Paneers for about four years, I'm proud to say that we've signed a partnership with Techstars, the global accelerator, to start and expand the effort to sharpen entrepreneurial skill sets in order to achieve the SDGs by 2030. This conference has been hugely insightful in providing reasons why we need to build businesses that create impact. Today we'll be discussing the exact area where the Rubber Mesa Road. I must say and I definitely believe that engineers are able to provide incredible breakthroughs for the associated development goals. But I won't be the first to say that not all good engineers make good entrepreneurs. We've prepared a session with the goal of equipping engineers to take the plunge with the highest rate of success possible by de-risking your product development process through a validation framework. So this morning I'm more than happy to introduce Cody Sims, Senior Vice President and the Sustainability Guru at Techstars to take us through the meat of today's workshop. Cody, the screen is all yours. Great. Well, thank you, Joe. I'm excited to be here. And I want to also welcome one of our portfolio CEOs, Meggy Williams from Skiptown. Meggy, you want to say hi real quickly? Hi, nice to be here. Awesome. So Meggy has been a practitioner of the workshop that we're going to run through multiple, multiple times. And so we thought it would be helpful for you all to hear context from her as well as someone who's actually implemented this in her team. And so really excited to be here today. Just, I guess maybe a brief introduction for those of you who aren't familiar Techstars. We're the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. We're one of the most active early stage venture investors in the world through our startup accelerator footprint. We run about 50 individual startup accelerator programs around the world each year. Each one of those programs invests $120,000 in 10 companies per year. So that's about 500 or so odd investments we're making each year around the world. So these are three month intensive sort of boot camp like programs to really help your company figure out, you know, are you pointed in the right direction and step on the gas pedal to keep going and then have a big support network of mentors and others around your business for the life of your business as you continue to grow. So you can always check us out at techstars.com and we certainly welcome any of your companies to apply just like Meggy did a few years ago. And so what we're going to do today is I'm going to show you a workshop that we do very regularly across our accelerator programs that are all about de-risking your business and figuring out the assumptions and hypotheses that you maybe still need to validate and kind of avoiding building your business on a house of cards right avoiding your build building your business on a number of things that you haven't yet proven that could ultimately results in you spending a bunch of cycles on waste for things that don't work. And so I'm going to drive through this but this is going to be a really interactive conversation between Maggie and me. Maggie you want to say a little bit about skip town just before we jump in. Yeah, sure. Thanks Cody. So I'm Maggie Williams I'm the founder and CEO of skip town. We make it easy for dogs and their parents to live their best lives when we do that through a tech enabled ecosystem and a modern country club for pups and their people. Awesome. And you can people can check that out what you want to show the URL real quick. You can just say it. It's it's it's skip town.io right. Skip town.io. Awesome. Well good well here let me share my screen and we'll go through this this presentation here. I also should say Joe we totally appreciate you logging in to introduce us at a very very early hour your time in Korea, or I should say not even early hour like middle of the night hour. So it goes to show that the world is global. Very much so and that we are all, you know we're all innovating but it can be hard to do at certain times of the day sometimes. A global world sometimes, you know requires us all to work odd hours so we really appreciate you joining us at your time. Okay, so, as mentioned this is a workshop called assumptions hypotheses and roadmaps. We've had thousands of founders go through this workshop over the over the years, and it's become one of our core pieces of content and core pieces of curriculum as you're going through tech stars. And so really the goals here are to understand the key assumptions in your business to rank order the assumptions that are critical to test, and so rethink how road mapping is done. And, and so I guess maybe maybe you want to just before we even dive into what this how this works, maybe you want to talk a little bit about how you all have used it at a very high level and what how it's been useful to your leadership team. Yeah, sure. So I've run through this workshop twice with Cody as a participant as a as a as a CEO and I've run through it with my leadership team, probably half a dozen times we do it every quarter. The first time that I did this workshop we were a dog walking company had about 100 employees and we operated across three markets through different cities.  But we made this pivot, because we learned something very important. And what we learned was how and why we needed to reassess the core assumptions on which we were operating, and we did that through this exercise that's what this workshop does. And I'm excited to be here to talk through it because it has been so invaluable to our business and to get us to where from where we were to where we are today. We would not exist as a company if we had continued down the path we were on and it was because of a lot of the things that we were blinded by that, you know by doing this workshop allows you to just kind of pick your head up and see the real a real a real a reality, then maybe what you operate under right now. That's great and I think that the last thing before we dive in that I'll add is, you know, there are there are oceans and oceans of content out there on product. Product process right, are you going to use scrum or you're going to use agile like how are you going to do this is not that at all. This is not a process workshop. This is a prioritization workshop which is very different, and it's really much more about kind of quickly building a sorting mechanism to help you understand what things you know and what things you don't know. So let's let's dive in and I did get a comment that someone commented on my Jordan ones in the background. I just want to say these were my, these were my dad's these were like from 1985 so I hold them very preciously. So thanks for over notice that. You know, a couple things, if you're going to do this one thing to consider is are you together are you remote obviously in this time of COVID-19 mini as many of us are remote. This workshop is written as though you are doing it together in a room with sticky notes, where you're putting things down and then putting them on a whiteboard, but if you're remote, there are a couple of virtual whiteboarding tools that I highly recommend. One is called mural.com and one is called mural.co. They're similar in function, but both allow teams to collaborate remotely with sticky notes on a virtual whiteboard. So if you are remote and want to try to do this afterward. Check out one of those platforms they're both, they both have free plans so you can you can use them in a lightweight way just for this type of exercise. Also, this is not an exercise to do by yourself. This really is important for you to gather input from different team members and I think you'll see why as we go but maybe maybe you want to represent a little bit about, you know, why it matters to get the input from your team as you do this, as opposed to, you know, you just doing it as the CEO yourself. So I think what makes this work, this workshop work is doing it collaboratively with your team because I think what you find is is that everybody's reality is different. And a lot of times your role determines your perspective. And if you work in a team, you, you probably know that already. And when you bring everybody together who has very strongly held beliefs, hopefully passionate strong beliefs but that can be persuaded once you have new information and that's what this workshop does is it gives everybody a chance to really have new information come together on it really talk through it to really understand what's the most important the most critical thing about your business to your business why your business exists, or whatever you're doing your project exists like what your what your common aim is. I don't get that if you do it siloed. And I think that, yeah, so I think doing it with a team, or with the people that you work with is absolutely critical to getting the value out of out of this prioritization workshop. Great. So diving in. We jump in with this workshop with very little direction. Founders who've never done this before come and they get this first slide, which is me just saying start working. The first request is write down on as an individual exercise not as a team on a per sticky note basis, things that you believe drive your business right and that's a very broad statement and it's intentionally vague. I encourage founders and companies to think about things like their product plans their tech plans their hiring plans their go to market strategies and really take about 10 minutes and just rapidly write down as many of these types of belief statements as they can. So this is, this is a volume play not an accuracy play because you're wanting to just get as many thoughts down on paper as possible. And so, got a couple examples here, not from one company but just a bunch of random hypothetical belief statements. Things like I believe the primary channel for customer acquisition will be through organic content marketing, or I believe, you know the fear of climate changes influencing where people decide to purchase their first home. Or I believe we should launch our product via university campuses starting in the Midwestern us right so these are the things that either you've already been trying to work on or on your roadmap to go figure out. And, and you know your goal here is to jam if you can get you know if you can write like one of these every 30 seconds over 10, over 10 minutes, you've got 20 and then if you've got four other teammates doing this to end up with 80 belief statements that are your, your canvas for starting this workshop. And you know, I mean, maybe I'd love to, I guess maybe flipping to the next slide like one thing I always ask founders after they do this is, how was it was it harder to get started was it harder to stop. Did you end up going down a single path like I'm going to write a bunch of belief statements about customer acquisition, or do you kind of go broadly across the business, and just I guess you know any feedback you've had as you run this with new members of your team who haven't done this before like this the first step can kind of feel confusing at first for people, but the feedback I give founders is that's like starting a business like you don't have no one's giving you the directions, you've got to kind of hear a little bit about what you think you do and then, and then, you know, figure it out as you go. And that's that's the goal here as well as that you'll refine this as you go but curious to hear, you know your thoughts about how team members have gone through this first step. I think the first time we did it it was absolutely uncomfortable because there's so many questions that you want answers to about how to move forward and you, you want to kind of create the rules before you play the game. And in this scenario you really just got to you just got to put stuff out there to Cody's point, you know, it's, it's quantity over quality. That's kind of the premise of just brainstorming in general right is you, you want the good ideas will come once you, you know, are putting everything you've got out there. And it does feel uncomfortable because you don't know if you're too granular if you're too broad if you're, if you're too specific in a certain area, but, and I think you just need to work through that and come and really write down whatever comes to mind because usually whatever's coming to mind is really how you're operating is really what you're believing if you can, you know, if you can let yourself stop from overthinking. You'll get to the, the truths that you operate on on a daily basis and that's, I think, and that's really what you want. And, and, you know, come later stages when you come back to come together with us on the team. It gets easier because it becomes more collaborative but at this stage, you know, just embrace the discomfort that will likely, you know, happen when you're trying to come up with these ideas and you're not sure exactly where to start or how to finish it. Sure. And I would say too, if you're doing it in a virtual setting, like if you're using Miro.com, you're all on the same screen together and you're kind of seeing each other right. But again, I encourage you in this very first step to do it individually. So, you know, each of you pick a little corner and put your sticky notes in the corner but don't talk through them because the goal is the more you talk through them at this first stage, the more you're likely to kill brainstorm ideas, right, because you try to develop consensus and that's not what you want to do here you want to get every idea on paper that people have. You know, it could be a pet project it could be something that other people think is crazy whatever get it on paper because it's going to get sorted through this exercise. So, step one, take 10 minutes right as many stickies as you can about things that drive your business. And then you actually go through and you look at each of the stickies as a team and this can take a while if you have 80 stickies like, you know, that could I mean I give you 15 minutes here in my workshop but sometimes teams are nowhere near done but after 15 minutes. You want to go through look at all the stickies talk through them together. If there are some that just feel duplicative you can kind of pool them together pick one that's representative of the bunch. And then the important step here is if you have data to back up a belief. This is an engineering panel so hopefully everyone appreciates the value of data.  Right so, and the guidelines for this are are really two things. One, do you have some kind of internal dashboard that shows this data somehow it doesn't have to be 100% accurate but you know whether it's Google analytics dashboard whether it's your sales pipeline whether it's your customers CRM whether it's your customer service logs, whatever that may be if you have some kind of intuitive data in your company that says this thing and the sticky is true draw a star. Or if you've talked to enough customers where you genuinely know this feedback to be true at least according to that segment of customers you've talked to draw a star on that you might want to, you know, make that start make that sticky a little specific to, based on these customer types or whatever it is you've talked to you but if you have a dashboard or if you've talked to enough customers draw a star, and then the rubric that I ask founders to go through is, would you wager me $100 that I'd agree that this should have a star on it. Right and so that's a that's meant to represent a very specific request which is.  And but it's also not so casual that you're just going to star everything like it needs to be like yeah I bet 100 bucks that this that someone would say I agree that there's data here. Anything you guys have come across when you're kind of trying to do this initial data step that that founders struggle with or that you know is is is where the kind of identifying where the challenges may come up here for people. Yeah, I mean I think this is one of the most important parts of setting up this exercise correctly to be able to get the value on out of it, and it is so easy and there's a tendency to want to believe that what you know is true. And for us to Cody's point would you wage your $100 it's it's making it's being really tough on yourself. The goal here is not to feel good about all the things that you're saying, you know for sure. The goal is to really understand what you possibly don't know, or don't know to the fullest extent. And so the way our team does it is when we be sitting around kind of going through the matter we've gotten rid of the duplicates. We'd look at the sticky notes and if we'd say okay have we validated this market size for instance we'd be like okay like wow. If there was even a pause if anybody did the like the sound. We would put it into unvalidated so really, really be conservative about when you're when you're going through this and what you're starring, because a lot of times you want something to be true. But back to Cody's point, if you if you if your life depended on proving that you had the data, would you be so sure. Yeah, and, and I think. Yeah, it's, it's, you know, a big thing we preach at tech stars is intellectual honesty and I think this is this is what Maggie just said is that right which is, don't lean into what you hope to be true leaning into what you actually know to be true for this specific market size and be hard on yourselves about those questions. So that's that's sort of step two, you create all these sticky notes, you go through them all to talk through them.  Did you notice differences in how each of you approached even the first exercise like I often find it interesting that like a CEO maybe really focused broadly across the business and then, you know, a product had a product maybe focused really tangibly on customer feedback on the business, and, you know, your head of sales maybe really focused on, you know, sort of pricing and your head of marketing oftentimes maybe really focused on, you know, on customer acquisition and like but that's great like that's where you get the diversity of sticky notes so I'm curious, you know, any experiences you've had with that, Maggie. So you do get that diversity in how not just what people come up with on the sticky notes but how people think through this question. And I would just say that after what now that we've done this a couple times, many times it pay attention to that. There's a lot of value and understanding how other people in your company on your team on a project think, and seeing what they go to and what you go and what you gravitate to is also a point of discussion that can like lead to you know just just a good side conversation and I think that there's a lot of value to that as well. And I think to Cody's point. And at least what we operate is that there's no right or wrong answer with how you approach that, but it is informative to know the, the, the mind frame the framework that people put around these kind of questions, because it really does define the reality that people hold when they're approaching this project and it's and it's good for people to understand kind of, you know, what other people's framework is, and this, and this helps tell that. And I would say the last thing and you kind of hinted at this a minute ago was, there's no right or wrong answer on how many stickies you have with stars, you could have, and you could have, you know, one sticky with star or you could have 40 stickies with stars and you know it's really it's where are you in this phase of product development as a business right so if you know and I've seen incredibly mature companies, but they're on a new product. They're having almost no stickies with stars almost no data. And I've seen companies that are still in the early stage cycle but they have one product and it's very simple and they've learned a lot about it and you know that they're able to star quite a few things.  You know, as you were doing this, I'm guessing when you moved into the physical events business, the physical space business for skip town. You were starting from scratch. Yeah, no correct. And we, you know, we knew a lot about the dog walking business, but we knew more than we were acting on, and you know it goes back to what I think this whole workshop on covers just confirmation bias is that you can live your life on in any in any capacity, kind of living off assumptions that you that you're, you know, you don't necessarily have data to back and that's what this is starting this is what's starting to uncover and this point in it. But yeah, I mean I think one of the reasons we moved away from the dog walking business, we had a lot of information, but there was some critical pieces of information that we weren't seeing and that would have let us down a pretty critically fatal path if we had continued. And by kind of realizing that calling those things out, gave us the courage to make different decisions. And if anything, I think this what you get out of this workshop is courage, because some of the things that you learn can be scary. If you when you dig deep things that you thought were true that may not be awesome. Okay, great. And then. So then the next exercise you do so you've got all these stickies. What I asked you to do is move only to the stickies with stars. So you're going to only look at the subset of stickies that you in the previous previous step decided to validate the ones you put stars on said yes we have data for that. I want you to look only at those. And these are your validated assumptions these are things you believe to be true about your business that drive your business and you have data that actually supports that this the statement you wrote is true. What I want you to do is when you're looking just at that subset. I want you to just the subset of validated assumptions. Now I want you to decide which ones of these do you think are most critical to your business so this is different than do we have data is this true this is are these things actually really critical to the business. So who now trying to get consensus among your team of all the drivers which ones of those drivers are the most important specifically of the set where you already know that they actually are true.  And so the way I want you to do this is to really think in extremes, I want you to not think about, you know how critical is it right now I want you to think about how critical is this as the business hit scale, like if this thing really is true to the utmost extreme is this going to drive our business to the moon, or is if this thing, like for whatever reason stops working or isn't true, or we mess it up, is it going to drive our business straight into the ground. So thinking those massive extremes at scale. And when the answer to that is yes for either of those questions draw circle so you'll end up with a handful of stickies that have both a circle and a star. Maybe anything you want to add to kind of the step of this, this sort of criticality phase and figuring out which ones are your top assumptions of importance. Only that if you're working on this with other people who are represent different departments. This does become.  And depending on how granular you go with the sticky notes that those questions come up, and people have to be willing to agree on what is a top validated assumption or a top assumption, and it might not be what they're particularly working on and I think that creates very productive and can create such a constructive dialogue. But for us that that's always, you know, a really fun and challenging part of this exercise is to align on what the top assumptions are. Because, you know, if you if you run the tech department, the most important thing maybe that you know that the technology is functional and that people will be using technology and that will be, you know, how we go into the future. And if you're running operations it could be totally different top about a deception so I would, I would just say think about that when you're going into it and make it a learning across, you know the whole group. Okay cool so we do that and then you know basically. You know I usually ask founders to think you know what was this easier hard were you aligned or are there things where you didn't agree and make you sort of talked about that a little bit and you know sort of the empathy of understanding and appreciating the, you know the perspectives of different teams and giving them the floor to make sure they're able to fully articulate what's going on in their department or from their experience with this thing. So you know I just ask how many how many do you select for circles and again the answers are always all over the map some companies will only have a handful some will have a lot and there's no right or wrong answer this is about you getting the data for your business. And so from from there, we kind of do the same step. So you look at all of your stickies without stars. So these are all the things originally that you said you didn't have data for right these are your unvalidated assumptions these are the things that you believe to be drivers of your business you believe we're going to move the needle about your business, but you actually don't have the data. So this is truly an assumption or a hypothesis at this point. And so I want you to do the exact same exercise you did before, but I want you to do it for the ones that, again, you don't have the data for go through and decide which of those are critical. And this is really tricky, because you don't have the data so you are making a gut call here, which is the one time in this exercise I asked you to make a true gut call of all of your unvalidated which ones are most likely to, again, take your business to the moon or drive you to the ground, based on what you all collectively feel. And so this, again, this is more this is a feeling one and I love, you know, I find the companies somehow magically tend to figure this out, like it's kind of obvious once you're once you have all these stickies which ones really feel the same, but, but you know, any insights on on how you have navigated this part of it, make it be awesome. No, I think that, you know, if you run companies you operate on gut a lot. So I think this ends up being a little bit of a more natural part of the exercise is to be able to make quick calls, and, you know, depending on your team and totally depends on your team. But I would agree that this, you know, comes the fastest probably in my experience for the people that I've done this with. Great. That's awesome. And do you do you end up do you ever get ones where you're stuck where you're like you can't get alignments or or whatnot and like and if so you know this is maybe a cultural thing for your company how do you ultimately make the call. And we operate with a lot of. We try to make it a culture of constructive disagreement. So people are used to dissension in the, in the sense that you know you can have a perspective and not agree, but ultimately we try to come to an agreement we try to come to an understanding of calling and people know that's the end point. So I would be interested in Cody how you would recommend people move forward when they feel like they're at a stalemate. For us we always drive toward getting kind of an answer on where you know what pilot goes to but I could also understand where people would just get so locked into being like no I truly believe it goes here, and someone disagrees. What would you say to do in that scenario. Yeah what I've seen work is actually to collectively rewrite the sticky and sometimes it's to break it into two. So sometimes it's to take a sticky and you know reframe it and you know maybe there was one part of the language that someone was held up on or you know it was it was too vague or you know some of them sometimes again different people in the company are doing this at different levels. And with step one no one had done this before so everyone's kind of learning as they go. Sometimes the stickies just need to be tweaked to rewritten and then you can usually do that and get to a point where you believe. That's the other thing I would add as you're going through this exercise. You'll also often and I'm sure this happens to you all, you know, you'll often also uncover new things that in discussion you're like oh man we should write that down and that's totally cool like right down put it put it put it on the board and add it to your list. You can start or circle it or both as appropriate. But I find that the discussions and brings up new insights like that that are actually really helpful. And it's totally cool to reframe the sticky notes as you go. If you all decide that, you know, rewording makes the most sense for your business. So then, you know, same thing, you know just really encourage you to debrief for a minute after you do this, you know, were you aligned where the ones you didn't, you know, didn't agree how many do you have for circles, etc. And that's sort of the workshop itself. It you know at the end you end up with these four and I know that was confusing circle stars blah blah blah but at the end you end up with these four piles of stickies and hopefully this brings it together. Right you've been that you end up on the on the left left quadrant with your high priority unvalidated assumptions, the top right quadrant with your high priority validated assumptions these have the circle and the star. The left is your low priority unvalidated that are essentially still blank, and your bottom right are your low priority validated that have a star but no circle. And so you can then move your stickies into these little buckets. One thing I do see a lot of companies tend to do as well as they'll actually, and this isn't part of my instructions but I love it when people go this path. Once throughout this phase, they'll then start to try to bucket the stickies by theme. So like these are our marketing assumptions or these are our product assumptions or these are our customer acquisition assumptions or what not to it's just, you know, it's a little bit even more kind of further refinements of the model. But you know you end up with this list of stuff, and then from there, you can actually use this to help you make decisions as a business. And so I'm going to give you my thesis on how you can do this and then let's hear from maybe on how you have companies actually do this. Now the thesis I have is that the high priority unvalidated the high priority validated assumptions the things that are a circle with a star.  You believe these are important your business that you have data that says they're important, and you decided that of those these are some of the most critical things you can do. You should be cranking on the stuff and of course you got to you know send individual features through feature validation but these are areas where your company should be focused now. The high priority unvalidated assumptions where you have a circle and no star. To me, these are the most important things that come out of this exercise, because these are the things that you have deemed to be critically important to your business, but that you don't actually know. And so this is that whole like you could be building on a house of cards here with this stuff. And so my advice is this is the area where you should spend a ton of time prioritizing for customer discovery. You know feedback interviews for user research usability studies, whatever it may be sales validation, you need to go out and figure this stuff out before you spend a bunch of engineering and product cycles building in this area because it could end up being huge amounts of waste. And then this is obviously overly simplistic but the bottom areas that both buckets of low priority. My advice is just ignore as much of that as you can so you can focus on the top things. So I'm curious how you all actually deal with this in practice because I know this is like the theoretical layout of this but you know anytime you're building a company everything's more complicated than the theoretical view. Yeah. Yeah, so when we did this workshop the first time we found out that a lot of the assumptions that we had that were critical to the business to our dog walking business. We just didn't have data around them. A lot of them centered on market size and the ability to generate new clients at the right acquisition costs to really support scaling the operations we had built. But only was a product market fit problem and you know we were operating on data that was anecdotal data that was anecdotal, but was supporting these critical assumptions that was kind of all moving us toward a certain path. You know, at that point when we when we skipped that out and we saw the unvalidated high priority assumptions we knew we had some homework to do. So we went back and we created a plan to go get that data and go really like put a new lens on how we were seeing what we knew and believe was core to the success of this certain business that we were running. And we know we came back and we came back to the table after doing that and we realized that we had, we, you know, we were very excited because we felt like we now had the foundation to make different decisions that we knew ultimately were going to fundamentally change the direction of the business. And I, you know, I guarantee that if you're part of a team that your team is operating off of different assumptions that you all believe to be true and some you might have data and some important ones you might not. And it's, you know, it's, it's a gravity creating experience to all at the same time, see that together. And then think about well where do we go from here and for me and for us that's always and that's, you know, that's always the most exciting thing is to be able to say okay now we know this. What concepts do we take to move it forward and in our case we completely pivoted our business we shut down most of the core product service that we were offering, and we expanded into a whole new direction, because of the learnings of this workshop. And that's why we do it every quarter. Yeah, and I've got, I've got a couple, you know, I've got multiple portfolio companies like you who do this on a regular basis and use it as a leadership planning exercise. You know, I also I personally run a nonprofit called climate change makers, which is a whole political action group around climate change. If you're interested in that check us out at climate change makers.org. We run through this as well ourselves as our own company so I kind of brought my leadership team through this workshop. And similarly we came into this sort of thinking like our assumptions were all about community growth and growing the community and what we what we ultimately ended up realizing based on this exercise is that our prioritization there was a little bit off. And that, you know, really our focus should be on community health and community engagement. And, you know, how we drive community diversity community retention and ultimately community community longevity and so, you know, this exercise really helped us shift our priorities as well. So, you know, I can speak from it a little bit as a, you know, as someone who's gone through it once or twice myself in addition to who's led the workshop lots of times. And then, you know, a lot of the reason for this I'm going to go through this last part really quickly but basically product development has changed so much like we've gone from a world where, you know, we used to build products in these crazy waterfall ways. I mean, I've been in the industry a long time and I started way back in the late 1990s, used to write these crazy documents called a product requirements document which was this like 30 page list of features that you wanted to go build, you would have, you know, engineering sign off and marketing sign off and whatever, and then engineering to build it and then you would ship it and you know that would be this like flow chart process. Obviously not how product is built today we all live in a world of agile or lean startup or scrum and we're running backlogs and burning down through the great thing about agile and lean startup and kind of modern product development process is it gives you incredible granularity on what you're working on right now. But it's really hard to plan what you should be working on three months from now, six months from now, where the vision of the company is going. And so, I find that this workshop can help you set a framework for where you should be focused. But this is where I sort of think roadmaps as they exist today are somewhat broken. You know, I think a roadmap as a sacred blueprint about what you're going to be doing a year from now is ridiculous like no company knows what they're going to be doing a year from now. And so what I see is a lot of founders changed, but you have to have a roadmap you need one to go raise money you need one for your team members to know what you're working on what the priorities are you need one for your board members if you have one to know what you're working on. And so I see a lot of founders try to pivot the roadmap into an aspirational plan this is what we're going to try to do. But even then, like you're saying that oftentimes very much unrooted in data or reality of like knowing what you're aiming toward down the road. So my big sort of thing I like to advocate for something I call a learning roadmap, which is rather than making it very super feature oriented like here's what we're building nine months from now which is basically a ridiculous thing to try to claim as a startup. It's much more about what are we going to learn over the next little while. I haven't heard people say and I tend to agree with this that you really only know what you're actually working on for about two months out two to three months out and anything beyond that is kind of let's see where the world goes. And so trying to create a roadmap that shows what you're building a year from now is a false premise, but showing the roadmap that says by two quarters from now we want to have learned this about our business or by three quarters from now we want to have learned that about our business and prioritized accordingly gives you a view on on how to show where the future is headed without committing to like little granular features that are going to set your team or your investors or others. False expectations of what you're actually going to be delivering.  I think and what we add on to that is how, what do we need to fail at to get those learns. And I think this was something that was also really powerful from from this exercise is is really leaning into failure as a as a positive thing. So how do you go out and test and learn and use that as feedback that drives, you know, future decisions. And, and when you think about like what what do I want to learn. It's also like what am I, what do I need to fail that to learn it. And so when we think about it in that way, failure becomes so much less of it because it doesn't become negative anymore becomes like, what do we need to do to break this to to realize something else. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you know, I think oftentimes it's just the difference of saying, you know, it's a semantics thing of saying, you know, we're going to focus on what we're shipping as opposed to we're going to focus on what we're learning.  And I think if you don't have data you only have hope. And so I also don't think you want to be in analysis paralysis where you don't actually do anything you just collect data, you've got to find that middle ground, but you want to make informed decisions so you're not jumping off a ledge every time you try to do something.  So we want to make sure that when you're jumping you're actually ready to catch an up drift.  They could be questions about the exercise they can be questions about Maggie's business skip town maybe questions about tech stars. We did get one question at the very beginning someone asked me if tech stars is live in Egypt. We don't have an accelerator program in Egypt that we have a very active startup weekend community in Egypt. So, you know, if you want to go. So if you can check out startup weekend, which is an organization of tech stars. It's, it helps you at the, you know, sort of very beginnings of your business spend, spend about 72 hours sort of figuring out is, what does it even mean to build a startup, but we do have quite a few other accelerators in the region. We have a program in Abu Dhabi. We have a program in Tel Aviv. I think those are two in the region there, but with potentially more on the way. So let's see we have another question. Joe asks, what are some mistakes entrepreneurs make most often when validating their data. You want to take this Maggie. Yeah, so something that's very important about all this is what we talked about it a little bit but what is that what is validated data. Right. And that's a whole conversation of itself is how do you source data that you can rely on and I would say that is one of the biggest right and I, we go after, you know, the industry leading reports, you know, that have been credit and they're credible that are validated IBIS, you know, industry leading reports specifically in our field that have, you know, that's have some validation because it's very easy to just go into Google and start typing and find articles and use that and you just have no idea the, the, you know, the agenda behind some of that or who's financing it, and it can really change the message and then the other so and Cody I would also, you know, think you should jump in here and talk about validated data as well. And the other thing I would say is how you perceive data so you could have really credible data but you just read it wrong or differently. And so I think, you know, how you are depending on how that great that data is being presented and how you are then perceiving and internalize it is also can also fit your story can fit a confirmation bias if you want it to. I think those are two really important things and I think if you have a team around it that goes back to why this is so important not to do by yourself. And it's so important to create that that culture of questioning and asking and reassessing because you know we've done that exercise and we've had people be like I don't think that's I don't think that data says that I don't. I think we have a discussion around it so I do think having more people in the room more perspectives in the room to kind of call that out will help true, true your, your, your baseline for, you know, accurate data, and how you're proceeding it.  I don't, I'm not a big believer in using a big, you know, heavy amount of like third party reports, I'm definitely not a big believer in using data source because that's what our competitors are doing. Because your competitors maybe, you know, just as, as uninformed as you were around what the market wants and maybe they've taken a leap of faith and you know you're going to jump off a blind leaf of faith with them which is not what you want to do. So again, I really emphasize the first party data sources. Let's see we have another question. Oh, I got a text source question so what services do text source provided startups that go through your program do you help with financing. Absolutely so tech stars. Actually, let me let me let me let you answer this because you've been through tech stars so what is tech stars provided for you. So tech is provided a lot so I went through the program in 2018. And so that was a fully immersive, you know, we were, we had nine other companies in our cohorts we got to do them really well. We went through workshops just like this, I would say offhand another dozen of them that were also led by industry experts with just just such incredible experience across the board that actually traveled around to deliver these workshops. And on a whole host of topics but we're really fundamental to do this, I think the success of any great any business that has the potential to be great. And that and then the most valuable thing for me is as as I continue to be an alum and supporter of the program and involved in many ways has been the network and the people, and the give first mentality that Cody I know you can talk to at length but for me was just permeated not just within my time at tech stars but it's something that I've definitely taken with me and has been something that I have gotten back 10x. And just it is a very involved and supportive community of high achieving people who want others to, to win, and don't think that someone else's when is their loss and that mentality is just is really hard to find. It's been a privilege to be a part of a group of people that just so strongly believe that. And then not only that but tech stars mentors came into one of our funding rounds so we have tech stars as an additional investor, and just a constant resource. Awesome. Let's see we probably have time for one more question. We had one that came in asking about what are good references or resources for validation processes. There was another one about stagegate process which I have to admit I'm not familiar with so I'm sorry I don't unless unless you are maybe I don't know how to answer that question. I have not used that methodology though. I'll definitely go read more about it. I have a question about resources or references for validation process. I would definitely point you to, there's a software planning tool called product plan. And they've got a really nice blog about product stuff. And so I'd encourage you to follow their, their blog and they do a lot of discussions around this type of work, which is a good resource I rely on. I think that may be it for our questions I think Joe you wanted to you're going to come back in and we're going to do a little wrap up with some really exciting news about about sustainability and some of the work we're doing together. And I want to make you want to thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to help us out and provide your insights I think it's so much more valuable for the panelists to hear from someone who's been doing this, then just to hear me talking to everybody so thank you so much. Thank you it's great to be here. Hope that helps anyone with a dog check out skiptown.io. Right, a very big applause and thank you Cody for going into the super helpful details of how we can base our company's decisions over things we can validate. The engineers listening here today are more like more than happy to be able to tell their CEOs that they need that data to validate their thinking and decisions. And I'm Maggie thank you also so much for adding flesh to the conversation and grounding us in a to a real context throughout the process. I'm definitely announcing to my team on Monday that we're going to have a 90 minute the recent session coming up at the end of the week. All right, I think I think our time is almost up so I'd like to extend my gratitude to the, to the 40 or so participants who took interest in our talk. You know, if you're moving on to the next program make sure to check out the tech stars and the city premier's virtual booth tech stars and with FUNA are together, preparing a tech star sustainability challenge. And as gracefully put a link for us. Yeah, in the chat. And we're looking for startups that make, you know supply chains sustainable and final deadline is March 31 2021 application application is open already. You know, please check out the link that you can find on in the chat box. And I think I think that's pretty much it.  There's there's two aspects of it one is data and automation the seconds materials and end of life impact I don't think we have the time to go into all the details about the challenge just here so please take your time to to visit us in the link below. And again, many thanks for participating in the tech stars and Mufuna assumptions and hypothesis the risking workshop. Thank you impact engineers and their staff. Mariella and Lily who graciously invited us to this event and made this workshop possible. And I hope everyone has a great lunchtime. Thank you again everyone. Goodbye.


Welcome back everybody. So let's talk about what dental hygiene school college university is the best and how to apply to get into the dental hygiene program. And I'm going to share with you what I did as well. So a quick side note was I actually took the dental hygiene program twice because my first school was not accredited and it shut down. The owner of the school literally walked away, they declared bankruptcy and we were all screwed. Basically, I have other videos talking about that on my YouTube channel, do a search for it if you want to learn more. But the second school I went to was fantastic and I wish I went to it right away because it was amazing and it couldn't just shut down. So let's talk about how you can apply for the program and how to really tell which school might be better than the others. I get this question all the time. So normally people apply to the dental hygiene program out of high school. You do need really good marks, math, sciences, Englishes, that's what they want to see. We're talking 80 to 90%. In high school, I did not get those marks. I did have high 80s in most of my classes, maybe a couple 90s, but I did not get 90% across the board. So when I applied to several schools for the dental hygiene program at a local community college or some that weren't too far away, they all said no. They all basically said declined, you are not accepted. And it was because my marks simply weren't high enough. So what I did was I applied to a private dental hygiene college. I suggest doing this. Private colleges are amazing. Typically you do pay a little bit more. It really depends on where you go. It could be a couple thousand dollars more or it could be $10,000 more or it could be the same. It really does vary by area. I may be paid $5,000 more than if I went to a community college, but it was worth it to me because I got accepted into the private college where all of the other community colleges would not accept me. So private colleges are just simply run differently but they will accept anybody. Your high school marks don't matter that much. You do have to take a short entrance exam on math, sciences, English. People always ask me how to study for that. I didn't study for it. I just took it and thankfully they accepted me because I did pass the entrance exam. I don't remember my mark, but trust me it was not a very good mark. I just remember passing it. And typically for private colleges you will also be interviewed. This might seem scary to you, but it's really not. They just want to get to know you I think. I literally just went into a room. I talked to one person. I think the program director at the time they sat there with like a clipboard. This is my makeshift clipboard. And they just asked me questions like, so why do you want to be a dental hygienist? Why do you want to come to this school? And those are easy. They don't ask you skill-based questions whereas in a community college, if you go to apply you are accepted among hundreds and thousands of people but they don't have time to interview if that makes sense. So I highly recommend a private dental hygiene college. I went to a private dental assisting college as well when I became a dental assistant because it was the same thing. No other community colleges would accept me because of my 80% in high school, which is fairly high but they just, you know, the higher the marks the better and they will accept those with the higher mark. So please look into a private college. They are completely worth it. Now talking about college or university there are some programs where dental hygiene is a university-based program. That's up to you. I personally didn't care. Why would I want to spend more money to go to university just to say I attended university? Nobody cares when you apply for a job.  They don't care what school you went to. So people ask me, should I pay more to go to the university? They do offer more, you know, classes. You learn more stuff. That's what they say. No, don't pay more unless for some reason you really want to say you went to university but who cares? Nobody does. I went to college, you guys. I never went to university. Look where I am now. I have my own mobile dental hygiene practice. So you don't have to go to university unless you want to. Now let's say you're applying. It is after high school, you are in college for another program but then you decide to become a dental hygienist or a dental assistant. Again, look into private colleges. They don't just accept students in September or the summertime. Typically they have a new program every four months. So if you didn't get in the first time for whatever reason or let's say you just missed that cutoff date then you can apply three or four months later. I remember when I decided to become a dental assistant it was a weird time like November. I was out of high school. I took a little break to work and then I'm like, you know what? I want to get back into things again. So I applied to all of the private colleges and their next class was like a month later. They accepted me and I'm like, oh my God, I have a month to prepare. This is amazing. So you don't have to think, oh, I have to wait a full year till they accept people again. That's another nice thing about private colleges. A little side note though, private colleges are typically, you do have to achieve really good marks to stay in the program. I remember both for my dental assisting private college and dental hygiene, we did have to maintain a 70% in every class or they literally kick you out. So you do have to get good marks but that's easy when you're learning what you want to learn. I received honors in both because I was so happy and I was excited to learn. I didn't like high school very much. So my marks weren't very good because I really didn't like it. But college, when you're learning what you want to, it really changes things. I hope this video helped you guys. If you're wondering about the cost, it does vary everywhere. When I took the dental assisting program, my cost was about $25,000. Oh no, sorry, sorry you guys. My cost was $12,000 for the full year. Now it's closer to $30,000. Times have changed for sure. It's closer to $30,000. For my dental hygiene program, I paid $45,000 for the 18 months and might be more now. And these are me going to private colleges just to give you guys an idea of the cost. But I really can't do that because it's been so long since I've attended both but just to give you guys an idea. Anyway, as I was saying, I hope you guys liked this video. Comment below if you need anything and please click like. That does help me and my channel. And if you haven't yet, make sure to click subscribe because there are new videos every Monday and Thursday, all things dental. So thank you guys again. Have a great day and talk to you soon.


Bravo! Bravo! And I'm Oli and this is our hero Bumblebee. Together we are attempting a Guinness World Record to become the youngest pair to circumnavigate the globe by Motorcycle. Join us for season 3 here in South America. Good morning guys. How's my hair? Good morning world. Welcome back to the channel. It's day 190 on our circumnavigation around the globe by Motorcycle. We tried to wake up for the sunrise this morning. We nearly made it! As you can see around us it's foggy in the mountains. Really foggy. The sun is up there somewhere. It has risen. But it's a really beautiful temperature here in the mountains. You can hear a lot of birds around us. It's a nature party going on here. It's like six in the morning. When we arrived yesterday we were the only ones. We were like, oh we will have a really really quiet and nice night. But then at like nine or ten o'clock three other people turned up and there had like a semi-party here going on. So that's it with our quiet night. But it was a cozy night in the tent. It was fresh. We had our coats on in our sleeping bags. Oh it was cozy. It was nice. And no mosquitoes. But let me show you guys where we're going to be riding today. So we are just about here just outside of Nova Friburgo and we are going to be continuing our way west along the mountains to finish the day in Petropolis. Yes a beautiful ride through the mountains today. We're going to be crossing over Rio, over Guanabara Bay and we should have some really nice viewpoints and nice mountain landscapes along the way. So it's about four hours ride today and we still have to pick up Bumblebee and pick up our tent and have breakfast. So better hit the road. Let's go. Welcome to Camping Ararat. Yes the best camping in the mountains. So the guys here at Camping Ararat just invited us in for a coffee and some bread with a view. Thank you, thank you. Wow beautiful. They don't speak any English so we're using Google Translate but they invited us in and they said you've got to come in and see the view here, have a coffee and have a little relaxation before you hit the road. So look at this. Bon dia, Laby and Oli. That's so cute. Look at this beautiful cake. Okay, we've got a giant passion fruit. Look at this. That looks amazing. So a beautiful breakfast but it's time to hit the road. We could have stayed here for like one week but we have to move onwards. We have to get to Petropolis. Straight into this big, oh my god, massive hill.  Quite scary right for the morning. Yeah that's a crazy start. Wow such a lovely family at Camping Ararat. Wow they were so so nice. Yeah I think this is my favorite campsite so far. We're going to try to avoid the crazy dirt road that we took to get up here. Hmm yeah it's definitely gotten a bit worse. I'm hoping that there's a second way which is cobbled like this. We just need to make sure we make the right turns to get down but look at the view this morning down into the valley. Look at this. It's so unbelievably beautiful. So nice here. Wow these guys they're living the dream really. He told us that he bought the plot 18 years ago. There was nothing on it and he lived in the tent with his wife for one and a half years whilst building his house and expanding and expanding and now they have like this huge property and it's just insanely beautiful. So we're going to make our way down to Nova Friburgo and across to Teresopolis and hope that the direction we're going now has cobbling all the way down. Oh my god. Oh my god that's steep. We made it down to the bottom. We made it into civilization without taking any dirt roads. I can't believe how difficult we made it for ourselves yesterday. Oh my god. But I'm glad that we could have a smooth start to this morning and now onwards we have just over 50 miles of beautiful mountain roads to reach Teresopolis. Coming through some big landscapes now. Pretty absolutely pretty. Yeah and a really nice road winding through them as well and here you can see on the sides actually that they've got quite a selection of English veg growing because we're at altitude so they're growing things like onions, spring onions, they're growing cabbages, lettuce. Everything you'd find in an English garden is what you find at about this altitude. I think we're at still possibly up to a thousand meters up so the air temperature is cooler and then the growers up here switching from the tropical fruits to the leafy greens and the garden veg. What's this one here? This is definitely some sort of onion.  Yeah down at sea level you get your fruit salad and up here you get your garden salad. You can smell it hey. Oh I could smell the onion. Yummy.  Oh my god that's nice. It reminds me of our little veggie plot back at my parents house in Northamptonshire. Hi mom and dad. Oh look football. The Brazilians love football. That's right always got space for a football field even in the mountains. Okay we're coming into our first big town of the day which is called Teresopolis. Teresopolis the name comes from the wife of the last emperor of Brazil Emperor Pedro II and his wife was called Teresa. That's really nice. He named like an entire city after her. That's really cool and it's really funny because after Teresopolis our next city is Petropolis and that's actually named after Pedro himself. So he's got his city and then his wife's city and both of those next to each other. That's nice but actually this city is really famous just for being the gateway to this massive national park. It's a really nice national park which is just starting in front of us. The national park is called Serra dos Orgaos which means the organ mountains but not like organ inside the body but organs like the church organs because I don't know if you can see just yet but there's a lot of these sort of like peaks that are like very up and jagged a bit like the organ in the church so the national park is named after that. But we're just going to be riding through the city because our lunch stop for the day is just on the other side and it's called Mirante do Soberbo. A nice little viewpoint where we can stop have a break and see the nice mountains behind us. Oh the German flag is the wrong way around. No way was it? Yes. So it looks like we are just coming up to our lunch spot for the day. Very cool. Look at these three hondas. Cool. Let's check out this viewpoint. Our lunch. Chips here. All right maybe we should get some. This is what we're here to see. Look at this. That's a big viewpoint behind us. Wow. I think that's Guanabara Bay in the background. Somewhere over there is Rio de Janeiro and there's actually a really really cool mountain but it's hidden in cloud at the moment up there and that mountain up there is called Deido de Dios which means God's finger and if you could see it it would look like this. But it's just clouds at the moment. Do you want a coconut as well? Okay. Yeah okay. Coconut. So nice. Let's go. Very nice vegetarian meal. Look at that.  This is a first for us. Wow look at that. All right lunch break's over. It's time to continue our journey to Petropolis. Look at this car. Nice. Beautiful. Beautiful. There was a nice lunch break, a nice little stop with a cloudy view but still quite nice and especially the coconut gave us some new energy for the next one hour 45 minutes apparently. Coconut road energy. Yes. So we found another camping on iOverlander. This one is actually called Espas Overlander which means Overlander space. So it's a camping which is dedicated to giving a space for Overland vehicles, motorbikes, camper vans. So I think that's the perfect place for us to spend the night. So it's just outside of Petropolis. So we'll be riding into Petropolis first and then onwards through to our camping. Yes camping. Look at all the beetles. It's a it's a VW beetle party. Wow. Nice. Look at this. Wow. Oh look at the sugar cane. Oh yeah. Nice. Pure sugar. Oh my god that looks juicy and nice. It does eh? It does. Cool. The VW beetle club. Super cool. Cheers guys. We see you on the road. We are getting up into the mountains now away from Teresopolis and we're heading on this beautiful little road called the BR 495 and this road is amazing because it's nestled in between two national parks. On the left you've got the one I mentioned before Park Natural Sierra Dos Orgaos. On the other side on the right you've got the Montanas de Teresopolis Natural Park. So this road is like a thin strip in between a vast area of mountains and forest and that's just absolutely epic to ride through. So we've got about 13 miles until we get to the end of this road. So that's 13 miles of ride of heaven. There's a sign for Capybara. That's a new one for us. We've had camels in Morocco and now Capybara in Brazil. I would love to see one of those crossing the road. How cute. We're just coming into Petropolis in about a mile or so and yeah you don't really want to be at Capybara crossing. Oh but look look look. Oh yeah our overlander space camping is coming up in two miles. Yes. So we're really getting there. We've made our way through the mountains. Oh there's Capybara. Oh my god. Oh I can't believe it and one was really big. They are really big. They're like little pigs. One was really big and I think it was the mom and then two were really small. Wow. So it looks like we're just coming into the central area of Petropolis and Petropolis is known as the imperial city. The story goes that Pedro II who was the last emperor of Brazil actually went to visit a farm up in this area. He was so in love with the climate and the nature and the mountains that he basically said right we're going to build a city here and on top of that we're going to name the city after me. So then you have born Petropolis and Petropolis is characterized by a lot of grand imperial buildings like the one we just saw actually like this one just coming up in front. I mean you've got a lot of these old style big big big buildings and there's also the main museum of Brazil. I can't remember the name I think it's called the Museum of Brazil and that's set in an old imperial residence. Yeah it's the most visited museum here in Brazil and I think about 300,000 people visiting it every year.  Awesome so this looks like the place Espasso Overlander Petropolis so we are just going to see if they're open and have space for us. Yeah So we just got another guest to speak to the owner of this place because he's not actually here she said that he said that it's fine for us to stay so we've just got to ride the bike in and then work out the details with him. Good evening! Lavi is over there eating some popcorn that we prepared last night. We've got bumblebee set up, we've got the tent set up and the other guests just left so we're the only ones here. This is a very cool little campsite in the city just on the edge of the city. You can see all the loft he puts in this place here you can see all the details and look at that. It's nice eh? It's some little buddha figures. It's got a little kitchen area at the back and this little you got the toilets and showers just here so it's really compact but it's everything you need really we'll see if anybody else arrives here otherwise this is going to be like a grand garden for us yeah really cool I'm really happy to be here so it was a really nice route through the mountains today we didn't have too much in the city with the traffic it was a lot of open winding roads which is amazing we did about 100 miles which is about 160 kilometers so not too much but it took us still I think about six hours on the bike so I'm really happy that we stopped for the day that we can just relax and chill out and see where we're going tomorrow so that's it from us today we hope you enjoyed the episode if so please give us a thumbs up subscribe to the channel share the video with your friends and family comments below we will see you next time


Hey everybody, what's going on? I am Greg Sospin, joined as always here on this Tuesday by JJ Zacharisen of Fandle, who's here to tell us who to buy and sell as we head into week eight. What's happening, JJ? Not too much, man. I'm ready for week eight because week seven was kind of a disaster. Super low scoring week all around and let's be better in week eight than we were in week seven. And I know you're serious when no player that you're mentioning today has to buy this week. So this is a really serious version of JJ Zacharisen. So let's begin first with Leonard Fournette.  He's been pretty awesome. Yeah, he has been pretty awesome. I think a lot of people don't realize how awesome he's been because he hasn't found the end zone much. He's only found the end zone once but based on his yardage total, which by the way, he's only one of three players with 900 plus scrimmage yards this year along with Dalvin Cook and Christian McCaffrey. But based on his yardage total, he should have closer to five more touchdowns than he currently has. Even if you give him 60% of that, even if you give him three more touchdowns, all of a sudden he's averaging 20 plus PPR points per game and he's an easy top five guy. So I think where the market views Leonard Fournette is not quite where he should be. So I think he's a buy candidate as a result of that. The one problem with that JJ is that the only person that may know how good Leonard Fournette is are his owners right now. All of us are being like, oh, it's Leonard Fournette. But his owners are like, man, this guy is awesome. If you trade for him, do it. But I think it may be a little bit tougher than you think. Another player you're buying, and this was predictable, is Kenny Galladay, who got usurped by Marvin Jones his four touchdowns this past week. He was coming off a two touchdown game on his own and did, well, nothing against Minnesota. He's facing off against the Giants in their brutal secondary here on Sunday, putting Kenny Galladay in a prime bounce back spot. And not to mention, his buy is already in the rearview mirror. Yeah, exactly. He gets the Giants this week. He gets Oakland the week after that. Galladay was one of just a few wide receivers who had seen a 20-plus percent target share in every single game played heading into week seven. And then that game happened where he only saw a 4% target share, but that sometimes happens. So you can either look at this past week and say, this is what's to come for Kenny Galladay, or you can look at the larger sample size and realize that Kenny Galladay is a very good wide receiver who's going to warrant a lot of targets in that offense. So he should bounce back pretty easily. No worries here about Kenny Galladay. I expect him to be fine going forward. A lot to like about Baby Tron for the Detroit Lions. One more player, JJ, that you're buying, and that brings us to Cincinnati's Tyler Boyd. You know, the ghost of AJ Green, it's coming, maybe, at some point, but this Bengals offense, it still doesn't have him any. It's about Tyler Boyd. It's about Alex Erickson as we saw this past Sunday. And obviously, it's about Audent T. But Tyler Boyd still seems to be the lead dog in Cincinnati. How come you're buying him right now? Yeah, look, I buy volume in fantasy football.  But Boyd is still top ten at wide receiver and target share. He's had a couple of bad outings over the last two weeks. So as a result of that, you're buying low. But like I said, I buy volume. Volume correlates strongest to fantasy success and fantasy production. And that's what Tyler Boyd is seeing. Obviously, a target going to Tyler Boyd from Andy Dalton isn't the same as someone like Tyler Lockett seeing a target from Russell Wilson. But at the same time, Boyd is seeing so much volume that it's just hard to ignore. For those that thought last year's breakout was, well, kind of fluky, Boyd's proven this year it's not. He's reliable. And it may not be Russell Wilson or Tyler Lockett, as you said. We'll take it, man. We'll take that target share. And we'll take how involved he is in the offense. Right now, the offense revolves around Tyler Boyd. And that's something certainly worth noting. All right, we gave you the players that you're buying. Now let's move on to the players that you're selling. Once again, we get to Aaron Jones, who didn't have four touchdowns this past week. He did have one. But that split with Jamal Williams continues to be relatively even. That means there are certain weeks where AJ is going to do absolutely nothing. You're going to use this opportunity to sell him.  He's found the end zone nine times this season. But based on his yardage total and based on just natural regression, he should have a lot fewer than that. With Jamal Williams out of the lineup for two games this year, basically two games because Jamal Williams was concussed against Philadelphia. Aaron Jones saw six of his nine goal line rushes. He had 82% of the running back carries for Green Bay. But with Jamal Williams, that running back rush share drops to about 60%. Obviously, he's not seeing as many goal line rushes as well. So I think this is a prime opportunity to just sell Aaron Jones. I think he should be fine for the rest of the season. But I don't think he's going to be top five fine. Aaron Jones will be fine going forward. But right now, his value may never be higher. I mean, it was the four touchdown game. But right now, it's gone past that. So it may not be higher in 10 than where it is right now. Aaron Jones is fine. There's nothing wrong with him. But if you can get something bigger for an Aaron Jones, it's probably worth selling off. Another player JJ that you're selling is Corey Davis of the Titans. And you want to talk about predictability, this is it. Corey Davis does this every year, where he has a big game and we're like, oh my god, Corey Davis has finally emerged. And then he has a three for 30. One difference now is Ryan Tannehill's the quarterback and not Marcus Mariota. We have done this in the past with Blaine Gabbard, too. Are you not buying that Corey Davis will be consistent going forward? You know, there could be something with this rapport between Corey Davis and Ryan Tannehill. But I'm still looking at this offense and realizing and seeing that it's a run-heavy offense. Corey Davis had a 25% target share on Sunday and he still only saw seven targets. There's enough competition in that offense with AJ Brown, with Adam Humphries, with the tight ends that they have who are both pass catchers. I think there's enough reason to sell Corey Davis despite the fact that this Tannehill thing could be real despite the fact that they're facing Tampa Bay this week. I think you use those two things and you use that to sell Corey Davis now rather than waiting. Because I do think that overall we're going to see unpredictable production from him. Absolutely, you got to be cautious in selling Corey Davis because that production level could be huge the former first round pick. But we have so much of a sample size of that inconsistency. I'd rather take my chances now. Selling him off, selling that dream to somebody else. One last player to sell and that is the Rams, Todd Gurley, who saw I believe just 60% of the snaps this past Sunday. No Malcolm Brown either. Darrell Henderson was the one that picked up the extra snaps. Gurley does not seem like himself and those that were not on him come into the year they seem to kind of be right. Yeah, look, Todd Gurley looks like he's a touched on dependent fantasy asset right now. Like you said, he only saw about 60% of the Rams offensive snaps this past week. Some of you might be saying, well, it's because the Rams were ahead but that's precisely the problem. If the Rams are ahead then what happens to Todd Gurley? We care about production when fantasy football. Now I do understand that they're facing Cincinnati this week which is arguably the best matchup that you can possibly find on paper but you're also running the risk of what happens if Todd Gurley doesn't perform in that game that all of a sudden you're selling him a lot lower than you are right now. Based on his yardage totals he should have about two and a half touchdowns. Maybe that gets a little bit of a boost given the offense and the situation that he's in but he shouldn't have six touchdowns right now. He's been pretty fortunate there especially given the splits in past to rush touchdown ratio for the Rams. So I think all of that together don't wait for the matchup. You can wait if you want to. He could go off this week. I wouldn't, I would just sell him right now because he has become a pretty touched on dependent fantasy asset. I would also sell him off right now because after this week's great matchup you have that buy and then you're like it's gonna be tough to trade a guy during a buy especially not someone like it's Alvin Kamara during a buy. It's Todd Gurley. You're trying to sell off anyway. It's gonna be tougher after this week.  You should get him now. That's probably your best chance to trade away, Todd Gurley. That's gonna do it for us here on The Fan. Don't hurry up JJ. Appreciate the time. Good luck this weekend. Thanks man, appreciate it. All right. Tomorrow, James Sanis will join me as we preview week eight from a daily fantasy perspective. Have a great night. Enjoy the tip off of NBA season and we'll see you back here tomorrow.


When I posted an advertisement for this, one thing I found was a study done in, I think 1999, they pulled some people and they asked the same question, is homosexuality a choice? 49% said yes it's a, I mean no it's a choice, it's not a choice in time. And the other 51% said yes it's a choice. So, let's do a little polling here. By a show of hands, who thinks it's a choice? Okay, who thinks it's not a choice? Okay, it's kind of the same thing, almost. Who did raise their hand? Okay, let's start with you then. Let's start with the fence and then we'll go that way. Yeah, so why are you on the fence? Just because I feel like it's not really a fair definite yes and no that it's a mixed population. So you might have people with no community who did choose to be that way according to certain states or what not, where they might feel more comfortable in that certain way or what not. And then you also have people who actually feel that they were born that way and they felt like that from the inside. So that's why you can't really say yes or no. And not calling out the police, speak up when you're talking please. Okay, so does anybody want to define the word choice as it relates to them? What do you think of choice in anybody? So is it a predisposition? Or is it just something you come to at a certain age? I think it's like both. Because when you're little you don't really think about it as much as you would if you get older. But I feel like you don't really know when you develop a liking to a certain gender. When you're little, let's say seven or eight, you're in kindergarten at first grade. You're just playing in the playground. You don't really think about what you like or who is what and what gender is. But then as you get older, you develop puberty, hormones and stuff like that. You don't really choose at that time to like a certain gender, but it's the urge is there from the start. Okay, for the people who raise their hand for choice, does anybody want to elaborate on that? Or would you like a question? Because I have a bunch of them. Alright, go ahead. I said choice, but I feel the same way you feel about the issue. It's a choice for certain people. Maybe it was a choice when I decided that I want to live just lifestyle. But for others, it's not until it wasn't a choice. And I think it's kind of hard to define what is a choice and what is not.  So therefore you don't categorize that as you say this is my only option either. I'm going to live like a villain to me or comply with what ABYLs think is right. So therefore no, it's not a choice anymore. It's what you feel is the only option. So that's why you know it's like on-defence situations. So thinking back on what you said, I can fully understand like sometimes it's that gravitational pull.  So you start to assimilate in some instances, you start to assimilate to that group. Now like I never really thought about it how she said it, but after she said it, I can see it being both ways with some people as it being a choice with some and then it might not be a choice for others.  So you assimilate to who accepts you. So that's the group that accepts you. Like he said, it was his choice that was the group that accepted him. So that's the group for lack of a better way to assimilate. Okay. Do you guys think there's a distinction between homosexuality and men and women? Does anybody think it's... We'll see the question.  Pretty much. Or the thought process? Our reaction to it is different. Maybe not necessarily that the feelings between the two are different because I feel like you can be a homosexual female and feel just as strongly about your partner as a homosexual male would. But I feel like how we look at it is different than how it actually is within the relationship. It does, it does. Do any of you guys know people who... Because I show them people like this. They... Female examples, because I don't know any male examples, but say they were heartbroken in the past by men and then turned around and now they like women. Who knows people like that? What are your guys' opinions on those people?


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