Episode 56: God, Loren, You Are Such a Jerk
Guests:
William Vanderbloemen is founder and CEO of Vanderbloemen Search Group.
Paul Downs is founder of Paul Downs Cabinetmakers.
Laura Zander is co-founder and CEO of Jimmy Beans Wool.
Producer:
Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word Productions.
Episode Highlights:
William Vanderbloemen: “People aren’t saying, ‘Well, we can go get two more bids.’ They’re just like, ‘Okay, send the contract.’”
Laura Zander: “I just got an email today from one of our major suppliers that says, ‘We’re increasing prices 5 percent.’ People are gonna start doing that across the board.”
Laura Zander: “We missed an entire season for one of our brands on the Jimmy Bean side—we make handbags—because we have a container that we still do not know if it’s at the bottom of the ocean or if it’s on this ship.”
Paul Downs: “I am not going to get into a tit for tat yet. I feel like once I enter full combat with this woman, it’s going to be very ugly for everybody involved.”
Full Episode Transcript:
Loren Feldman:
Welcome, Paul, William, and Laura. I hope you guys are all doing well. We’ve got some catching up to do, especially with you, William. It’s been a while. Has anything interesting happened in Texas since the last time we spoke?
William Vanderbloemen:
It’s been more than a little interesting, but the big thing that we have been experiencing in my little sector of executive search, where we’re helping people with finding the right talent—about November or December—I started shouting from every mountain top I could find and through every megaphone—
Loren Feldman:
Including this one.
William Vanderbloemen:
—including this one, that there would be a job churn, and man alive, have we seen that. We’ve been busier than ever for all the different reasons that I had listed. I don’t know how long that will last, but it doesn’t appear to be something that is a flash in the pan.
Laura Zander:
Are you seeing that at all the different levels? Or is there a regional pattern? Or is it just like the dam just opened?
William Vanderbloemen:
It’s all the things. I don’t want to retread old ground—but some of it is hires that were being put off, some of it is people who would have left their job in 2020, but they stayed. Some of it is new jobs that are lower down the org chart and highly technical, because everybody’s live-streaming now and everybody’s got video channels running through their schools or their non-profits or their churches.
Some of it is succession has sped up. People are like, “This has changed, and my team needs a new leader.” So it’s just all those things, all at once. I think there’s some measure of optimism from our clients. We’re not out of the woods yet, and we’ve got to be careful, but boy, it looks a lot better than it did six months ago.
Laura Zander:
Well, that’s probably gonna lead into Loren’s next topic, at some point, about Texas and optimism and not having any mandates anymore. Right, Loren?
Loren Feldman:
Thank you, Laura. Let’s go there right now. William, one of the reasons we haven’t spoken to you in a while is because, for a couple of weeks there, as I understand it, there was no electrical power in the state of Texas. How did that affect you?
William Vanderbloemen:
We got out probably better than we should have. We were without power for 72 hours, I guess. But we have natural gas fireplaces, and even as cold as it got, the inside of our house didn’t dip below 50. We bundled up and taught the kids card games. We had that horrible Harvey storm in 2017, so we probably had a dozen LED lanterns around the house as a result of that. We had plenty of light and plenty of heat, and I made all kinds of new things on my charcoal grill. I have one of those Big Green Eggs. I made cornbread. I made breakfast. We kind of made the best lemonade we could.
We didn’t have any water damage. Our pipes are fairly new, so the materials held a little better. But there was some real damage, and it was such a trainwreck of errors. I think everybody on every part of the political spectrum has legitimately said, “Yeah, part of this is our fault.” Like, the finger-pointing is kind of pointless because it was a mess all over: a calcified, nasty, old, antiquated system compounded by a once-in-a-hundred-year blizzard storm. Every county in the state of Texas got winter weather. Texas is bigger than France, so it was pretty amazing.
Loren Feldman:
It may have been a once-in-a-hundred-year storm, but one of the things that kind of perplexed those of us who don’t live in Texas is that it isn’t the first time this has happened. Apparently, I had forgotten this, but something similar happened about 10 years ago, and there was a lot of talk but not a lot of action afterwards.
William Vanderbloemen:
It’s easy to say from a distance, Loren.
Loren Feldman:
Yes, it is.
William Vanderbloemen:
But 10 years ago was nothing like this. I was here 10 years ago, and yeah okay, we lost power for a little while, but it wasn’t like this. This was different. I don’t know if any of you guys have seen the movie, The Perfect Storm, where all three things happen at once and it’s just too bad for George Clooney and his crew. It was kind of that, and there’s some who want to point the finger at, “Well, if y’all were not deregulated, then…” but I think the cooler heads of all ends of the political spectrum are like, “Yeah, we need to refresh the system. This needs to be upgraded.”
I don’t know that there’s one easy answer of, “If we were regulated or deregulated,” but this was far worse. Now, what’s interesting is, since 2017, we’ve had three 500-year flood events in Houston, and now a 100-year winter event in Houston. I don’t know, when the locusts and frogs and other forms of pestilence show up…
Loren Feldman:
We just had Passover.
William Vanderbloemen:
Exactly.
Loren Feldman:
Laura, you have an operation in Texas as well, as we’ve discussed frequently. How hard were you hit by this?
Laura Zander:
We were hit super hard. We were basically out of business for a week and a half, I guess. We lost all that revenue. In fact, I just …
Loren Feldman:
What exactly happened? Did you lose power? Were you flooded?
Laura Zander:
We were flooded, and then a number of our employees couldn’t get to work. Quite a few of them lost power for seven to 10 days. But then we got flooded right at the beginning of that first week, and then it just took forever. My team is so good that they spent the time… they didn’t want to wait for somebody to come clean it all up, so they just cleaned it up themselves, so that we could get back to work sooner rather than later.
But yeah, we are just now, finally starting to get back into the flow and having a new normal. Insurance claims I just got yesterday. I talked to the insurance guy, and hopefully our insurance is going to kick in and will help cover some of the loss that we had. So, that’s helpful. I think it’s the first claim in 19 years that we’ve ever made, so that was a new experience for us. And we had just moved in, like two or three weeks prior. It was crazy.
Loren Feldman:
Was there a lot of damage?
Laura Zander:
There was a fair amount of damage. It was probably a couple inches high, so all the baseboards will have to be replaced. It came from the sprinkler system in the ceiling, so the ceiling tiles had to be replaced. We had boxes and boxes of yarn, both undyed and dyed yarn, that all got damaged. Then we had tons of bookshelves and it went to the offices and so steam cleaning all the offices. It could have been much worse, but it wasn’t great.
Loren Feldman:
William, did it have an impact on you from a business standpoint?
William Vanderbloemen:
Not really. We had a few people without power. What was interesting was, once the power went out through most of the state, your ability to text was almost nothing. I don’t know if you experienced that, Laura, but I think every teenager in Houston was streaming Netflix over their cell signal.
Laura Zander:
Oh, right!
William Vanderbloemen:
That was the biggest pain. We couldn’t send or receive email in any form or fashion or texts. Ridiculous responsiveness, as you guys have heard me say before, is one of our values, so it was pretty hard to live that out. But that passed after a few days, and people across the country were incredibly gracious about, “Oh, no worries. I saw the news.” So it was a hiccup, but nothing like the interruption that last March was.
Laura Zander:
Yeah, I think for us, it’s like you said, the ridiculous responsiveness. We have been trying for the last 15 months to build this brand back up and build back up trust. Delivery has always been one of the issues, that we just can’t dye the yarn and dry it and label it and do everything that we need to do to send it out fast enough. We’ve been trying to get better and better and better and better at that. You throw the pandemic in there, and so we’re not being as responsive as we could be, or as we want to be. Then we moved, which of course, if you can imagine, moving a factory and having to build it all up and blah blah blah. We’re losing time there, and then to get hit with this… how much more patient can customers be?
They can’t get mad about the pandemic, and they’re not going to get mad about the fact that we’re moving, and they’re not going to get mad about the fact that there’s a deep freeze, but at some point, they’re going to get tired, whether it’s consciously or subconsciously. It’s exhausting. It’s really exhausting.
Paul Downs:
Are you communicating with them?
Laura Zander:
Absolutely, and that’s the big difference. When this hit, we sent an email out to everybody immediately. And we’re like, “Look guys, this is the deal. We got flooded. We’re fixing it as fast as we possibly can, but it’s gonna put us two weeks behind.” We were already kind of behind. We’re already booked up through the end of this year, and so we had to put a stop to taking new orders and taking new accounts. We’ve just got to be able to catch up and train these new people that we’ve been hiring.
We’ve hired 10 new people in the last three weeks, since this happened, to try to get back up, but then there’s a training period and there’s a learning curve. The feedback we’re getting is, like William said, customers are understanding and they are appreciative of the communication, but if the locusts hit, I don’t know how much more of this people can take.
Loren Feldman:
Laura, how did that hiring go? That’s a lot of people to hire quickly.
Laura Zander:
It is. It went really well. One of the reasons that we wanted to move to the location that we’re in now is because it’s more centrally located to the labor pool, and we’ve been treating people really well. We’ve got people coming in all the time looking for jobs, so it actually has worked out pretty well.
Loren Feldman:
That’s nice.
Paul Downs:
What’s the skill level required to make someone into a useful employee for you?
Laura Zander:
Just reliable. Pretty reliable, relatively smart, but not a tremendous amount of skill, because we have so many different positions to fill. You could do something as simple as putting labels [on]. It’s very factory, and then there’s more complicated stuff. My approach has always been, if somebody seems like they’re a good person, and if they’re reliable, and they’re not going to cause a lot of drama, then we can find a place. If they fit with the culture, we’ll find something for people to do. We bring them in, and after a month or so, we really figure out where the best fit is for them.
Loren Feldman:
Before we move on, William, I want to go back to the deregulation issue a little bit. One of the things that I think those of us not in Texas were surprised to learn was that studies show that, since deregulation, the price of electricity had gone up dramatically in Texas—even before the storm, leaving aside what just happened. Is that your understanding as well?
William Vanderbloemen:
I think it depends on how hard you work at it, Loren. I’ve got a good friend who’s with a fairly new company—it’s maybe five or six years old—called Energy Ogre. Basically, it’s a company that built an algorithm that shops electricity rates for you on a daily basis, and then it calculates: What’s the cancellation fee for getting out of whatever contract you’re in, and does it save you money to switch or not? Last year, we probably switched providers eight times, all because the algorithm did it for us. Our power bill is as good as it’s ever been.
Loren Feldman:
One of the things we heard about was that there was a variable rate and people with the variable rate were gonna get socked with huge bills. Is this a variable rate situation you’re describing? Or something different?
William Vanderbloemen:
Well, you don’t have to do variable rate here, but we choose variable rate, and then we don’t do it because we sit and watch the rates every day. We do it because we hired a software company that watches the rates every day and makes the adjustments. I think they had one or two hiccups, one or two providers in particular, that took advantage of the situation, but for the most part, it worked.
Now if you’re like, “I don’t want to pay attention to rates, I don’t want to have to think about it,” you can always choose a fixed rate for the year and go with it. But personally, I like having the choices and the flexibility. I love the algorithm that’s been developed, and I got lower bills than I used to. But that’s just me.
Loren Feldman:
And you didn’t get hit with a big bill for the period around the storm?
William Vanderbloemen:
It was larger than normal, but I think that’s true for everybody in the state. I don’t know that regulation or deregulation would have solved that.
Loren Feldman:
How about you, Laura? Did you get hit with a big bill?
Laura Zander:
Last I checked in, it didn’t seem that huge. I think ours was like 800 bucks. But I’m on the Energy Ogre website right now, so i’m gonna check that out. Thank you!
William Vanderbloemen:
It’s pretty cool. It’s very well done and they’re super smart people, so I think they’re in most of the deregulated states now.
Laura Zander:
Okay, all right. That’ll be great, because that’s one of the things when we moved into this factory is we built an air conditioned kitchen. Before it wasn’t air conditioned. It was just open-air. We’re kind of trying to figure out and see what this is gonna look like, in terms of energy usage because of course it’s gonna be a lot more expensive.
Loren Feldman:
Those of us not in Texas saw this all happening and I think we’re tempted to think, “You know, maybe those folks in Texas are going to realize that not all regulation is terrible and this is going to change things. I think I’m hearing from you that it’s not really going to change anything at all.
William Vanderbloemen:
What you’re hearing from me is my experience. I’m not your prototypical person you just described. I watched the Ken Burns documentary on the Roosevelts, which, if anyone listening hasn’t watched that, it is just magnificent. And if you’re a nothing-needs-to-be-regulated kind of person, go watch that. You’ll change your mind. But my experience, for this particular instance, is that deregulation has been good for my family.
Loren Feldman:
I’d like to go back to what you started with, William, with your prediction coming true of the year of COVID churn. Has it affected your company itself? Have you had turnover at your business?
William Vanderbloemen:
Well, I think part of the reason I was able to have some level of clairvoyance on this was because we already dealt with it. Two of my five lead team people left in 2020—one at the front-end of the pandemic and one after we were through our particular hardest part. But they both had very good reasons and were needed elsewhere, frankly. Losing 40 percent of your lead team during a pandemic will make you say, “Huh, I wonder if this is going to happen elsewhere.”
Since then, we’ve seen a little bit of it, not a lot. We restructured early. We bet back in March of last year, our gamble was that this was an 18-month problem, not a two-week problem, or whatever it was, to flatten the curve. We made pretty radical adjustments. The people who have come through that with us, it’s almost like we went through something big together, and right now they’re staying. Now that could all change. Who knows?
Laura Zander:
Twelve months ago, you guys did a phenomenal job of digging in and educating yourselves on the PPP and on all the government assistance and basically what was going on. And then you graciously shared all that information and did all these webinars and emails. How useful was that to the business? Looking back, are you really glad you did it?
William Vanderbloemen:
Yeah, well, I’m glad we did it because it was the right thing to do. If you’re a business owner, and you didn’t have a moment or two last year where you sat and wondered, “I wonder if we’re going to make it or not,” then I don’t know what you eat for breakfast, but I’d like to sign up for that menu. Because we were like, “I don’t know if this is gonna work or not,” and kind of made the conscious decision, “Well, if we go down, we go down serving.”
Martin Luther, one of my heroes of protestantism, said, “I’m always at the same time a sinner and a saint.” The saintly part of me is, “We’re doing good.” The sinner part of me, or the self-centered part of me, would say, “If you help people find free money during a pandemic, they’re going to remember you on the back-end.” And that is certainly true.
Loren Feldman:
William, I know you guys are really good at tracking things, and you told us that you’re busier than ever now because of the churn. Are you able to track to what extent the additional business you’re getting is coming from existing clients or new people that you helped through the PPP?
William Vanderbloemen:
Well, it’s a little harder equation than it used to be, but the answer is yes. When the summer comes, which is usually a time when our world slows down a little, we’ll take a more forensic look at it. We’re big believers in Seth Godin marketing. I’d rather have 1,000 people who are a tribe who will follow you anywhere than 100,000 people who read your newsletter. And I think, whether they were existing clients that we did some work for or someone that never heard from us, our service was well-received and has led to I’m not getting questions for competitive bids this year. I can tell you that from just feel, not statistical, but people aren’t saying, “Well, we can go get two more bids.” They’re just like, “Okay, send the contract.”
Loren Feldman:
So have you raised your prices?
Laura Zander:
[Laughter] God, Loren, you are such a jerk!
William Vanderbloemen:
You know, the people who call us and say, “How cheap can we do this?” almost always don’t end up being a client. It just doesn’t work for what we do. But yeah, I have to say my gut would tell me, we’re already seeing a return on investment, if you will, and the statistics will bear that out in the summer in a lot of different ways. We have a lot more clients. We were making concerted efforts to break into schools and non-profits, and those are all up and to the right. It’s gonna be interesting forensics.
Every Monday morning—probably more than just Mondays—I do, “How is this week against the same week last year in about 20 different categories?” We have a software tool that shows me that in a nice red-amber-green sort of thing. And I asked our tech people, “Can you build one that shows me how we did against two years ago?” Because it’s really not helpful to me right now to see: How did we do against this week last year?” It makes me feel good, because we’re 1,400 percent more busy than we were 12 months ago, but it’s not helpful.
Paul Downs:
I have a question for you. Are churches in general and the organizations you deal with, are they not as strapped as they expected to be? The context of the question is, the federal government released this flood of cash that is now sloshing around in the economy. I’m curious whether it ended up being donated to churches. I can see it’s going into the stock market and housing prices, but where else is it ending up?
William Vanderbloemen:
I don’t know the answer to the money the government’s releasing, but I think on average for our clients—which may or may not be a fair random sampling of all churches—they all finished with about 95 percent of the giving that they had the year before. Now, the other little secret is their operating expenses were much, much, much lower. They had no heating and air conditioning from March through December. Buildings were shut down even down to the custodial services. When you do 95 percent of your revenue, and then your operating expenses are lower, it was a much better year than they had thought when this whole thing kicked off. I think the thing they’re holding their breath on more then than I had expected is, “What does this look like long-term?”
Loren Feldman:
So, Laura, I gotta go back to you. You called me a jerk because I asked about raising prices.
Laura Zander:
I think you’re taking Jay’s place today.
Loren Feldman:
Maybe you need to look at your prices. When was the last time you raised your prices?
Laura Zander:
Years ago. We’re looking at raising them this year.
Loren Feldman:
Oh, what a jerk, Laura!
Laura Zander:
No, but you can’t build a bunch of trust and do all that. I know you were just joking. We had a price increase on the table last January, or maybe it was last March. And then of course when COVID hit, we’re like, “Okay, forget it. We won’t do this.” This is on the manufacturing side, on the wholesale side. We are going to raise the prices in 2022. We’ll just go ahead and release that plan and give people plenty of time to adjust to it.
Our suppliers—I just got an email today from one of our major suppliers that says, “We’re increasing prices 5 percent.” People are gonna start doing that across the board. So many people got hit so hard that you’ll see these little teeny price increases.
Loren Feldman:
I’m starting to hear from a lot of people that prices are already going up across the board.
Laura Zander:
Yeah, totally. I was just gonna say, the freight? Oh my God. Just shipping. We missed an entire season for one of our brands on the Jimmy Bean side—we make handbags—because we simply couldn’t get it. We still have a container that is sitting—
Loren Feldman:
In the Suez Canal?
Laura Zander:
We have a container that we still do not know if it’s at the bottom of the ocean, or if it’s on this ship. I think the ship maybe now is in Alaska or something. It was supposed to have landed in December. 40 percent of the containers fell off the ship out of however many—20,000 containers. They haven’t gone through all of them, so we don’t know if we just lost everything. We don’t know when it’s going to get here. But that’s a ton of stuff that we can’t sell. We basically missed a whole season.
William Vanderbloemen:
My friends who are in construction are just amazed at the price increases. Lumber is like 3x what it was 12 months ago. You can’t find the cans that ceiling lights go in, the little circles. You just can’t get those. They’re stuck on freighters. I’m hearing the same sort of thing.
Loren Feldman:
All right, we’re running short of time, and there a couple of things I want to make sure we catch up on. One is with you, Paul. You were on the show last week, and you told us about the cyber crime that you had experienced where payments from a client had been diverted, never reached you, went to an elderly woman in Texas. Can you give us an update?
Paul Downs:
I had what I would call a very unsatisfactory response with the owner of the company who got stolen from at the very beginning of the episode.
Loren Feldman:
This is your client, who tried to make payments, and those payments were diverted without ever reaching you.
Paul Downs:
Something happened in her accounting department that allowed these things to get diverted, and when I told her about it—I don’t know whether I was the first one or not—she basically said, “Oh, this must have been you.” And then we were cooperating with the bank that had received the payments and taxes, and so the fraud officer there was keeping me informed as everything happened, and it was clearly not us. The money never got into our accounts. We did a review with my cyber security consultants to make sure that no emails had been sent to that client that we could identify that directed any change in the banking information.
So after all that, I hired a lawyer and had the lawyer write a letter that said, basically, “Here’s all the facts, and this is your responsibility,” and then heard nothing for another week. Then I shot her an email on Monday, just saying, “Can you please give me an update where you are with this? You owe me 140,000 bucks.” And she said, “We will send you one check tomorrow overnight,” and she did—a handwritten check for one of the payments—the smaller one—25,000 bucks. Basically saying that she had to be quiet because I had engaged a lawyer.
I’m still into her for $118,000. She wants me to continue producing the work that she had sent purchase orders for, and she’s blaming me for getting a lawyer. I’m pretty disgusted with her, I would say, but I’m not in a situation where I can just terminate the relationship. Although in my angry mode, that’s what I feel like doing, because life is too short to do business with people who aren’t good partners. That’s my feeling.
Loren Feldman:
What do you see happening next?
Paul Downs:
I think I’m gonna wait a good long while before I see the other payment, the $118,000, which is money she owes me for work that was completed. I am going to have to make a decision about how I deal with the work that we are under contract to do. I believe what I’m going to do is grit my teeth and complete it, and hope for the best.If I don’t see any of the $118,000 for another month or so, I’m going to be pretty disgusted, because I happen to know from the Texas bank that at least half of that was already returned.
The situation, as far as I can tell, is, it’s most likely that my payments weren’t the only ones and that this person got a pretty big shock when a bunch of her money disappeared. I would guess she’s scrambling for cash and just trying to juggle all the people she owes money to and all the other people who got ripped off. That’s not a good place to be, but I think she could have dealt with it in a way that made me more sympathetic to her rather than less.
Loren Feldman:
Paul, do you know the value of the work you have in process for her, and do you know when it’s due to her?
Paul Downs:
Yeah, it’s about $60,000 worth of stuff, and there’s a small piece of it that’s due at the end of April. There’s a larger piece, which is due at the end of June. And she said, “I want an update on when you’re gonna deliver all that stuff. I don’t want it to be delayed, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” It was terrible. It was a terrible interaction. It was by email, too. She’s like, “Well, my lawyer says that since you engaged counsel, I can’t communicate with you anymore.” It was pretty bad.
Loren Feldman:
Are you debating whether you actually send those goods to her?
Paul Downs:
I’m gonna do it, because I’m gonna do the right thing. She issued a P.O. She paid me the deposit on that, and I am not going to get into a tit for tat yet. I feel like once I enter full combat with this woman, it’s going to be very ugly for everybody involved. I’m going to give her some time to hopefully get an insurance claim, or whatever she’s working on, and see if she can clear her books with me. There’s a scorched-Earth strategy available to me, which is to go around her to the ultimate client and say, “Hey, did you know this has happened to someone you’re trusting?” That would be bad for everybody. But it would certainly sink her boat, and I don’t really want to do that yet.
Loren Feldman:
Okay, the other thing I wanted to follow up on is with you, Laura. I think the last time William was on, we spent a lot of time talking about your situation with your husband, Doug, a co-founder who’s interested in stepping away from the business. One of the issues that came up is how you replace him, who you hire, how you find a really good engineer to take over, especially given that he’s built the platform that you operate your company on and is really the only person who knows how to make it work. Can you give us an update of what’s happened in the weeks since?
Laura Zander:
Sure. In the weeks since…
Loren Feldman:
Or months, actually.
Laura Zander:
Yeah, in the months since, we’re going to try and just look around ourselves and see what’s out there, given all of the churn that’s happening right now and given the number of people who are moving to Reno from the Bay Area. My head of social media and marketing—she used to work in the Bay Area and she worked for a startup—and then our head of HR, they are working together and working with Doug. They’re just gonna cast a net out for different levels of engineers—definitely not executive level. We’re just gonna see what’s out there for just a little while. That’s kind of where we’re at right now. They’re interviewing Doug. I gave them a whole list of questions and job positions, and we want to be really flexible and see what’s available. And then we’ll kind of gather that information and see where to go from there.
Loren Feldman:
So you haven’t made a decision as to whether you want to hire someone who walks in capable of taking on Doug’s role, or someone who he would have to train over a period of time?
Laura Zander:
Yeah, even if we were to do that, we’d still need a couple of experienced engineers. We’re going to try and fill in from the bottom up a little bit. Like I said, we’ve got two people who are on his team right now, and they’re very beginner. Doug is teaching them how to code. We’re gonna see who’s out there who’s maybe one level above that and who’s out there who’s maybe two levels above that.
Loren Feldman:
And have you made a decision on whether you will stick with the home-built platform that Doug created over, I think, 18 years?
Laura Zander:
Yes, and the conversation that I’ve had with William, and with Karen as well, really sparked a lot of conversations with Doug and I. And one of the things that we realized or decided on is Doug is spending the next six months or so working on an API. We do believe our system is a really great system for what we do, and it’s very customizable, but obviously the issue is maintenance and adding new features is a problem. So what he’s gonna do is, he’s building an API so that we can start to kind of outsource new features and have somebody else maintain new things that come out and maybe start to slowly replace the whole thing instead of trying to do it all at once.
Loren Feldman:
Tell us what an API is for those who haven’t gone down that road.
Laura Zander:
Oh, it’s application programming interface. It’s like with Shopify or—I’m trying to think what it was in the beginning. Like the App Store.
Loren Feldman:
The point is that you can bolt something on.
Laura Zander:
Yes, exactly, and then people could bolt stuff on in their language of choice. They would just have access to our back-end, to the database structure and to the logic. And where Doug really, really excels is in the logic part of things logic part of things.
Loren Feldman:
So, is he okay hanging in there for a while?
Laura Zander:
Yes…
Loren Feldman:
He doesn’t have a choice. That’s what you were going to say?
Laura Zander:
Yeah, he doesn’t have a choice.
Loren Feldman:
All right, guys. I think that about does it for today. My thanks to Paul Downs, William Vanderbloemen, and Laura Zander. As always, thanks for sharing, guys.
