Transcript
Speaker: We're welcoming a new voice to the show.
Speaker: This Kickstart investor started his career at powerhouses like Vivint and Nike.
Speaker: Today, he's a product market fit expert investing in tech-obsessed founders across the Mountain West.
Speaker: Join us in today's conversation with investors Tanner Potter and Kat Kennedy for a special episode of Perfect Pitch.
Speaker: Perfect Pitch is a podcast from Kickstart that reveals the minds of both investors and entrepreneurs throughout a startup's journey.
Speaker: I'm your host, Karen Zelnick.
Speaker: Tanner and Kat, thank you so much for being here today.
Speaker: Thanks for having us.
Speaker: You're well.
Speaker: Yeah, you're welcome.
Speaker: And before we get into the conversation, I'm going to introduce Tanner and I want to cover the highlights of your career, which will show our listeners why you're the perfect addition to the show and why you're such a great investor in the ecosystem.
Speaker: So you earned your bachelor's in business management strategy from BYU with honors, I might add.
Speaker: And you have your MBA from Harvard.
Speaker: And in your earlier years of your career, you worked at Vivint as an operations manager and a product manager before transitioning to Nike with a focus on digital product.
Speaker: And today, you're a kickstart principal with an eye on fintech, AI, e-commerce, and the future of work tech.
Speaker: You're an avid reader, world traveler, and loyal fan of the Utah Jazz.
Speaker: What else would you like us to know about you?
Speaker: Oh, man, that feels like anything else I say is just going to bring me down from there.
Speaker: It's going to be low lights.
Speaker: But I'm also a big fan of the US men's national team.
Speaker: I played soccer in high school and love just chanting USA.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: And Kat, it's always great to have you back on the show.
Speaker: We'll have a link to your bio in our show notes.
Speaker: And what is something else the audience doesn't yet know about you?
Speaker: You know, I'm in my dance mom era.
Speaker: I do the work of an investor.
Speaker: By night, I sit in my car and watch my daughters and dance.
Speaker: And every weekend is spent at dance comps and really gotten to know that whole... I mean, it's a culture.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: What's been the most surprising thing about the dance culture?
Speaker: Oh, the most challenging thing I've ever done in my life is put false lashes on a six-year-old child.
Speaker: If I'd known that was a requirement, I never would have done it.
Speaker: That is, it's like wrestling a cat.
Speaker: But yeah, the toddlers and tiaras thing, it's got nothing on dance moms.
Speaker: I like that.
Speaker: I should maybe reveal this too.
Speaker: This might need to be struck in from the record.
Speaker: How do you say that?
Speaker: Striked, stricken.
Speaker: Striked, stricken.
Speaker: When I was about eight years old, I watched my older sister dancing in ballet and decided I wanted to get involved.
Speaker: And so I do have a year of me as a green tree and tight, light green spandex with all females, except me dancing with them because I thought it'd be a good idea.
Speaker: So I feel like, you know, I had to hang up the tights, but you know, maybe with Kat's guidance, I can get back into it.
Speaker: That photo needs to go in the show notes for sure.
Speaker: Harvard grad and ballerina.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So fun fact, my mom told me, cause I wanted to be in ballet like my sisters.
Speaker: And she said, I wasn't quite graceful enough for it.
Speaker: So I was in tap.
Speaker: Talk about things you end up talking about with your therapist.
Speaker: She regrets it, but she was like, I was just trying to help.
Speaker: The tap kids always get high scores.
Speaker: Oh, because tap is hard.
Speaker: Tap is like one of the hardest styles of dance.
Speaker: This is going to end up being a dance podcast.
Speaker: If I, we should, we should probably move on, but yeah, you'd be proud of your tap skills.
Speaker: I will.
Speaker: I'll put that picture in the show notes to my cute little tap outfit.
Speaker: But speaking of other careers you could have been in that you did go into Tanner, you started your career at Vivint and how did your role change while you were there?
Speaker: Yeah, I started out at Vivint in an internal consulting analytics role.
Speaker: We were working in operations and we worked with different teams on projects, everything from like, how do we bring down call center costs to how do we decrease the number of complaints?
Speaker: And from there, I went on to manage the quality team.
Speaker: And I think...
Speaker: As I was going around and I would talk with different leaders at Vivint, I was like the messenger bringing the bad news saying, hey, here's where our complaints are failing.
Speaker: Here's where our costs are rising.
Speaker: Here's what we should do to do it differently.
Speaker: And I realized at the time that what I really wanted to be doing was creating the problems.
Speaker: like they do in product.
Speaker: And so I decided that I wanted to try to become a product manager there.
Speaker: And so luckily, despite not having an engineering background, I was able to transition there after having worked with a number of people in product and moved over to become a product manager over the Doorbell Camera product line, for time the Outdoor Camera product line and other networking hardware software pieces.
Speaker: I was just getting so interested in what you were saying that I was like, what's my next question?
Speaker: So that's really interesting.
Speaker: Very interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, you are.
Speaker: You're very interesting.
Speaker: Not quite as interesting as a ballerina tree, but I'm just kidding.
Speaker: That was your first product focused position.
Speaker: And then after Vivint, you were hired at Nike where you started out focusing on digital product.
Speaker: So tell us about your evolution of your career from there and then how the two roles were different and learnings you had from your early career.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: If I rewind a little bit in undergrad, I spent some time at Goldman Sachs.
Speaker: And as I spent time working there, it was just a summer internship.
Speaker: I found myself really bored and wondering why I was there.
Speaker: And so coming out of undergrad, I really wanted to do something that I wanted to have an impact.
Speaker: And so I looked at consulting, looked at Amazon, Google, and I ultimately decided to go to Vivint because I felt like I could really make a difference there.
Speaker: It was really exciting.
Speaker: They're focused on consumer tech innovation.
Speaker: Went there, started as an ops, as we just mentioned, went to product.
Speaker: And there it was really fun because we actually built and shipped physical things.
Speaker: There's a lot of satisfaction from actually seeing your product in the wild.
Speaker: I walk down the street in my neighborhood and I see the doorbell camera that I built.
Speaker: Or Kat shared in one of our Slack channels here,
Speaker: a beautiful video of somebody in her family singing on the doorbell camera.
Speaker: And so that made my heart happy for multiple reasons.
Speaker: So at Vivint, it was really fun to work from the zero to one hardware process.
Speaker: At Nike, I was focused on membership and their membership program.
Speaker: And so that was much more like business impact focus.
Speaker: Talking about digital experiences, how we want to create those, how we wanted to link those to the retail and Nike flagship stores in LA or Chicago and what we could do to bring in digital experiences to that.
Speaker: So very different in terms of focus and outlook, but ultimately focus on how do we make magical experiences for people.
Speaker: Kat, how was your product experience different or similar to Tanner's?
Speaker: I started my career as a software engineer.
Speaker: I actually didn't know what product was until I was at degree.
Speaker: And David Blake, the CEO, was like, you're great at engineering, but you kind of shift into product.
Speaker: You got a product mind.
Speaker: And I was like, what?
Speaker: Because all of my prior experience had been heavy-duty scrum.
Speaker: We had a scrum master.
Speaker: It wasn't the fun parts of product.
Speaker: And so I fell into product...
Speaker: But what I quickly learned was product is really just a focus on ensuring that whatever you're building is something that people need and that they could be benefited in their life if it existed.
Speaker: So Tanner has incredible experience, both on the tangible hardware products, something that is...
Speaker: So difficult to do well and how that needs to blend in with the software side as well.
Speaker: The consumer side of products where it's not someone telling you, you have to use this product because you work in this organization.
Speaker: No, you're choosing to go out and buy it because that experience is so meaningful.
Speaker: That's not my experience on product.
Speaker: My experience on product is we are solving for needs in organizations.
Speaker: And we're creating software that blends into the rest of their employee experience stack to accomplish that.
Speaker: So while the center of product is always make something people want, make something people will use, the ways in which that can manifest in our lives today is so varied.
Speaker: There's software, there's hardware.
Speaker: I mean, you go to a jazz game.
Speaker: the experience of a jazz game as product.
Speaker: And so really, as you think about the different ways it can manifest, there's so many different career paths that people can walk.
Speaker: And that's one of the things I love about what we do here at Kickstart is the experiences that
Speaker: of Tanner and I, while product is inside of both of them, vastly different experiences.
Speaker: And it gives us a very cool opportunity as founders come in and pitch us because we can see the opportunities no matter the mechanism that their business is going to come to fruition through.
Speaker: Yeah, super cool.
Speaker: Tanner, do you have any response to that?
Speaker: Or should we dive right into your Kickstart story?
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's the fun thing about product is that it touches everybody.
Speaker: And you're always thinking about the consumer and the consumer needs.
Speaker: And the unit of account on the consumer changes when you're in a B2C company.
Speaker: That's an individual when you're selling B2B, like Kat's saying, that's often a team or an entire department or an entire organization.
Speaker: And so who you're developing for and who you're trying to impact changes.
Speaker: And that really makes a big impact in the type of role that you have.
Speaker: I'm just going to throw in this story from Nike because...
Speaker: It's something that I learned.
Speaker: But one of the most interesting piece of feedback I got at Nike is I gave a presentation on product there, a product that I was pitching.
Speaker: And my manager came and she sat down with me and I thought she was going to say, Hey, this slide doesn't make sense.
Speaker: You need to fix that.
Speaker: And she came in and told me that the fonts on my slides were wrong.
Speaker: She said that I needed to align them better.
Speaker: I needed better pictures.
Speaker: And the 12 slides of data that I had needed to all be cut out.
Speaker: And at first, I was like, kind of angry.
Speaker: I was like, is this really what matters?
Speaker: She had me pitch it to like 10 different people.
Speaker: And I got the transition so down.
Speaker: It made me realize a few things.
Speaker: One product and the reason Nike built such a great product is because they care so much about the details, the narration, they focus on really what the customer wants.
Speaker: And then it made me think a lot about as an investor or an entrepreneur, when you're pitching, getting down the slides and the details and the transitions matters a lot.
Speaker: What else would you tell founders about pitching with their slides?
Speaker: I think there's probably some nugget there that we should share.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: One of my favorite quotes, I actually worked with a bunch of Nike people at Vivint was edit to amplify.
Speaker: So often to better tell the story, you need to edit it down and simplify it.
Speaker: And like I was doing on my deck, I think I had like 10 pages of data and charts.
Speaker: And they're like, no, you need to take all that and put it into one slide and make it simple.
Speaker: You know, there's that quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Speaker: It says like, you need to find the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
Speaker: And that's often what happens once you've gone through the messiness of creating a slide deck and then simplifying it down.
Speaker: And so I think my advice there is try to get to that simple elevator pitch, what it is that you're doing, and try to limit that to 8 to 10 slides and really get down the transitions because the transitions
Speaker: from one side to the next, really how you're telling your story.
Speaker: It's this, then that, because of this, because of that.
Speaker: And so I think that's one of the things that it taught me was how to better tell a story, which is what you're doing when you're pitching a startup, what you're doing when you're pitching to your manager.
Speaker: Anytime that you're working, you're telling a story.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And any response to that, Kat?
Speaker: I love the experience of Nike.
Speaker: Is there a better known brand?
Speaker: I think the Nike swoosh is the number one tattoo.
Speaker: What that says to me is that people feel a personal affinity to the story of Nike.
Speaker: They don't have a swoosh because they love...
Speaker: the stores, they have the swoosh because they have an affinity.
Speaker: There's a story.
Speaker: There's something in their life that mattered that gave them this tie to Nike.
Speaker: And so storytelling really just highlights this
Speaker: core human need that we have to have a tie to something to understand something.
Speaker: And throughout humanity, we've done that with storytelling.
Speaker: And so the best brands in the world, they tell a story, they help you feel a part of that story, they help you understand why their product, their experience is going to amplify your experience of that story.
Speaker: And that's really what product is all about.
Speaker: We are thinking about the human stories.
Speaker: We are thinking about the human experience.
Speaker: There's something that's going to be different about your story if you put this product into play.
Speaker: And that is true for companies.
Speaker: That is true for consumer products.
Speaker: That's true in any conversation that you are having with other people.
Speaker: You need to understand what the story is.
Speaker: You need to see how your story would change if those two things came together.
Speaker: And that is just a lot of fun.
Speaker: I think it's a fun challenge for all of us to consistently be telling more compelling, simpler stories.
Speaker: Taking complexity and turning it into simplicity is super, super hard.
Speaker: Apple does a great job of this.
Speaker: Their brand is so straightforward.
Speaker: It is so, so, so hard to make things simple because there's always endless complexity behind it.
Speaker: So yeah, basically, just a very long winded way of me saying ditto to what Tanner said.
Speaker: And by saying, you know, you found the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
Speaker: So that was great.
Speaker: You can watch the hero's journey.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We used to joke how once you do a presentation, you say, yeah, here are the pain points or the jobs to be done.
Speaker: People would be like, Oh yeah.
Speaker: They hadn't realized that all the complexity that took to get to that simple thing.
Speaker: But when it's simple and they get it, they're like, yeah, no doubt.
Speaker: That's obvious.
Speaker: But you're like, it wasn't obvious.
Speaker: Let me tell you why it wasn't obvious before.
Speaker: Let me tell you.
Speaker: Yeah, that's so cool.
Speaker: So with your passion for product and how much you clearly enjoyed it, what interested you in switching to VC, Tanner?
Speaker: Yeah, like... And to do more spreadsheets, apparently.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I like the data.
Speaker: I like making money.
Speaker: No, I didn't know what product management was before I started interviewing for it.
Speaker: And the same thing with VC.
Speaker: I didn't really know what VC was until a friend of mine who worked at Kickstarter at the time introduced me to it.
Speaker: And I think what really interested me about VC was, I felt like I could work in a
Speaker: product, business type role, not with just one or two products like I was doing at Vivint, but I could do that across the portfolio.
Speaker: And I could see B2C and B2B.
Speaker: And I could see something in enterprise and something in SMB and something that was networking based and something that was in fintech.
Speaker: So to me, that variety really interested me.
Speaker: And then I think the second was...
Speaker: At the time, I had had multiple roommates.
Speaker: My roommate that was next room to me was working on a startup.
Speaker: The one across the hall is working on a startup.
Speaker: And the one downstairs was getting ready to leave a bigger company and go do a roll-up.
Speaker: And so seeing that happen, I wanted to work with those people that were taking risks and going out there and trying to create something in the world.
Speaker: To me, that's what's the most exciting part about this job is working with people who want to make a difference.
Speaker: They don't want to just do the trod path.
Speaker: And so that got me interested.
Speaker: And Tanner, I know that there's a fun story about how you came to be at Kickstart.
Speaker: Tell us about that.
Speaker: So actually, Kickstart approached me via Jason at the time.
Speaker: He was an associate, I believe, at the time at Kickstart.
Speaker: He introduced me.
Speaker: He was a friend that I had worked with in undergrad.
Speaker: And it was one of those stories where like... I don't know if this is the right analogy, but it's like getting set up on a blind date where you're like, I don't want to go.
Speaker: And then you go and you're like, Oh, crap.
Speaker: I really like this person or I really like this opportunity.
Speaker: And it was a little bit like that for me.
Speaker: I realized as I was interviewing and talking with Gavin and Al, Dalton and the team, wow, this is something that I really want to do.
Speaker: I feel like it fits my personality well, my interests.
Speaker: And so I applied, I interviewed.
Speaker: And the long sad story is I really, really wanted the job and I didn't get it.
Speaker: And I remember I got a call and Gavin said, Hey, we really liked you.
Speaker: You were such a good fit.
Speaker: We think there's another role in the future that you might work out for, but not now.
Speaker: And nobody wants to hear that.
Speaker: And so I was pretty bummed.
Speaker: I remember talking to my girlfriend at the time, my now wife, Sarah, and we were both pretty sad.
Speaker: And that prompted me to actually go apply to business school, do the work of writing the essays, go through that process.
Speaker: I applied and got into HBS.
Speaker: But I had on the back of my mind that whole time, I really like VC.
Speaker: I really like early stage VC, like pre-seed and seed, where it's just an idea.
Speaker: And I really loved the people at Kickstart.
Speaker: And so I reapplied.
Speaker: Gavin had come out to Fenway Park for a visit.
Speaker: I remember chatting with him there.
Speaker: And then I stayed in touch with the partners.
Speaker: And ultimately, with Fun5, an opportunity came up and I jumped at it.
Speaker: And you both touched a little bit on how a product background applies to VC, but could you each speak to how your product experience has translated into VC?
Speaker: And Kat, I'll have you go first.
Speaker: I want a Tanner to go first.
Speaker: Okay, Tanner, you can go.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's a few ways.
Speaker: I think one of the most interesting is that as a product manager, you're mostly working laterally with individuals.
Speaker: I wasn't managing a bunch of people.
Speaker: I was managing a product.
Speaker: And then there was literally hundreds of people that were working on that product together in concert, but none of them reported to me.
Speaker: And so I had to learn how to work to influence, to try to guide, shape, finesse a product into being...
Speaker: And I think one of the things I've realized about VC is that we don't have big teams.
Speaker: You're not managing a lot of people, but you're working on boards, you're supporting companies in advisory roles, you're introducing new people who want to get connected to the portfolio.
Speaker: So you're almost always working laterally with people where there's not a formal hierarchical relationship.
Speaker: And so for me, that was one thing that was very similar.
Speaker: And I think the second that's a corollary to that is
Speaker: As a product manager, I worked with a lot of diverse teams.
Speaker: I was working with designers and electrical engineers and mechanical engineers and Taiwanese ODMs and New Zealand-based engineering teams who all have different outlooks, different approaches.
Speaker: Designers think very differently often than the way an engineer thinks about a problem versus the way that the business operations person thinks about a problem.
Speaker: So as we are talking with entrepreneurs every day...
Speaker: You're working with a lot of different types of entrepreneurs.
Speaker: Some come from very different backgrounds.
Speaker: And so I think that's helped me a lot.
Speaker: And then I would say maybe the third thing would be thinking through the customer problem, building something people want, and making sure that there's a business there.
Speaker: That's just fundamental to creation of any business, the creation of any product.
Speaker: And so I find myself using frameworks that I used as a product manager, thinking about those things almost on a daily basis as a VC.
Speaker: I love that word of influence.
Speaker: As a product manager, the joke that people make about product managers is like, what do they even do?
Speaker: Are they even necessary?
Speaker: And sometimes I'm like, are they joking?
Speaker: They really don't think I did anything.
Speaker: But it is something that engineers will say, hopefully in jest the majority of the time.
Speaker: And the core of that is because the actual building belongs to the engineers.
Speaker: As a product manager, you're influencing, you are data gathering, you're giving advice, you're helping them to anticipate what roadblocks they're going to run into as they're building.
Speaker: So you get to work cross-functionally, you get to provide a lot of data, you get to anticipate and have hunches and make guesses and then validate those.
Speaker: It's a lot of scientific method at work.
Speaker: And as I got into conversations with Gavin and Dalton and Al, and they were telling me about the work and what it could be like, and I talked to other investors as well.
Speaker: It was a lot of the same muscles that I developed inside of product and as an executive that I loved putting to work.
Speaker: They were using something I helped to build.
Speaker: That's so freaking awesome.
Speaker: And that little nugget getting to be like, Hey, we had a little piece in helping them build that thing.
Speaker: And they are making the world different in some way or another.
Speaker: Now that that is becoming a reality that feeds me, that energizes me.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: What gets me up and excited to come to work every day is like, we get to make cool stuff.
Speaker: We get to help people make cool stuff and help them anticipate what's going to hit them in the face as they're doing it.
Speaker: It's very exciting and energizing work.
Speaker: Yeah, I would add to that too.
Speaker: That building, oftentimes in organizations, whether you're an organization or you're founding a startup, a lot of people don't agree or don't agree with whatever you're trying to build.
Speaker: I remember when I was at Vivint, we were seeing all these trends.
Speaker: This was like 2017, 2016, that packages and package delivery were going through the roof.
Speaker: And so we wanted to build this doorbell camera that would be the first of its kind to have a 180 degree field of vision vertically so it could see straight down the floor as well as a 180 degree width.
Speaker: And I remember talking and actually an engineer on our team, part of the idea and people in management, I remember there were a few of them that were like, what is that really that important?
Speaker: And so it required this belief and conviction that like, hey, this matters.
Speaker: This is going to be there, even though there's no data or there's not a lot of data yet that suggests it.
Speaker: And so to Kat's point on it, exciting.
Speaker: Having founders that are building non-consensus stuff that like oftentimes other people are like, oh, that's not really needed.
Speaker: And then to watch it come forth and be needed is so fun.
Speaker: And thank goodness he built the camera that way because my 18 month old child snuck out the door and it caught her because it saw the ground.
Speaker: So seconds after she escaped my home, the camera caught it.
Speaker: So I sent it to Tanner like one, I'm not a bad mom.
Speaker: We got her seconds after, but like, check out this camera tracking my child and alerting me.
Speaker: I need that camera.
Speaker: Now the door locks immediately after it's closed.
Speaker: Thank you to Vivint.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This isn't a Vivint ad.
Speaker: But we're sharing cool products on this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Let's get into the ecosystem and a little bit of the things that we are building and that you're helping build as VCs.
Speaker: And let's talk about sort of the last 5 to 10 years and the way that the industry has shifted in VC and the entrepreneurship ecosystem.
Speaker: When I first learned of venture, it's when I joined Degree and was told, you'll get your paycheck when we get this money closed.
Speaker: And I was like, wait a second.
Speaker: You can call yourself a business and not have revenue.
Speaker: That's how I got to know venture.
Speaker: And that was back in 2012.
Speaker: It's been so cool to see the ecosystem evolve.
Speaker: There's been some really incredible funds here for a long time, long before 2012.
Speaker: But the amount of capital that is now flowing into this ecosystem is vastly different today than it was back then.
Speaker: and feel lucky to be a part of a firm that had a key part in that evolution.
Speaker: But it's also been cool to see the amount of companies that are now being started.
Speaker: So it's this virtuous cycle of companies exit, more founders understand the journey, and then they go and ask for money.
Speaker: And then more money flows into the ecosystem because there's more startups.
Speaker: So it's a very rich, thriving ecosystem at this point.
Speaker: And we are seeing companies across a lot of industries being started.
Speaker: The U having a massive impact in the biotech and health sciences side, down at Silicon Slopes, all of the exits that are now breeding more SaaS companies and FinTech really coming online over the past five to six years because of some of the
Speaker: behemoths coming here.
Speaker: We got the Divi exit.
Speaker: We got MX doing great things.
Speaker: I could go on and on and on about the amount of companies.
Speaker: But success breeds success.
Speaker: And more money coming in breeds more success.
Speaker: Yeah, I totally agree.
Speaker: I remember when I was graduating, I was deciding whether to go to Vivint, which was, I guess, more startup-y or Amazon.
Speaker: And I asked probably 20 different people.
Speaker: And I think one person told me to go to Vivint because at the time, it just was not socially acceptable.
Speaker: It wasn't cool to do.
Speaker: Undergrads, different systems pushed you to go to consulting or banking or other big firms.
Speaker: And now you're seeing kids graduate from whether it's undergrad or MBA and join a startup directly.
Speaker: And so it's been fun to watch that transition.
Speaker: Then I realized like, okay, we're starting to make some movement.
Speaker: And to Kat's point, we're diversifying our industries.
Speaker: We have great SaaS companies that's been leveraged in fintech companies.
Speaker: Now we have a lot more consumer companies.
Speaker: And so I'm excited to see that both in Utah and in Colorado.
Speaker: Colorado has probably even a broader breadth of companies to see that happen as the ecosystems mature.
Speaker: Tanner, we like to ask everyone on this podcast the same question as we wrap up.
Speaker: And so I would love to know from you, what is an effective practice that you've implemented in your work or personal life that you think has had a great impact on your success?
Speaker: For me, it's been just reading a lot of reading.
Speaker: Books have actually helped me, I think, get two jobs.
Speaker: I remember when I was interviewing to become a product manager with a great guy named Brian Brower, I had just read Creativity Inc, which is by Ed Catmull, a U of U grad who founded Pixar.
Speaker: And we were able to connect over that at our lunch at Lehigh Inn and In-N-Out because we had read the same book and we were able to talk and geek out on that and what that meant and what that meant for product experiences.
Speaker: And then the second time I can think of that happening is with Dalton actually at Kickstart.
Speaker: Dalton likes a lot of esoteric sort of material.
Speaker: And we had both read this book called Homo Deus and Sapiens.
Speaker: Sapiens is a much more popular one than Homo Deus is a follow on to that.
Speaker: And we ended up chatting a bunch about that and developed a strong relationship because of that book.
Speaker: So for me, reading and being really just curious has helped me to try to at least be smart or sound smart.
Speaker: I feel like you are smart.
Speaker: I was calling out for some validation there.
Speaker: So I appreciate that, Karen.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm here for you.
Speaker: Books are great.
Speaker: Books are great.
Speaker: I don't even have as good a story.
Speaker: One thing that helped me get my first job was having the same coat as the person I was interviewing with.
Speaker: And so mine's a lot more shallow.
Speaker: So let's just like...
Speaker: Have a blue coat.
Speaker: Anyway, Tanner and Kat, thank you so much for joining the episode today.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Fun to be on.
Speaker: Thanks everybody.
Speaker: And of course, thank you for listening as we dive deep into what it takes to create the perfect pitch.
Speaker: If you want to learn more about our investors, Tanner Potter and Kat Kennedy from kickstart, we'll have a link to their profiles and longer bios in our show notes at kickstartfund.com.
Speaker: And hopefully that tree ballet photo as well.
Speaker: You can listen to more episodes of Perfect Pitch wherever you listen to your podcast.
Speaker: And if you like what you're learning, leave us a reviewer rating.
Speaker: We'll be back next time with more insights from entrepreneurs and the investors who fund them.
Speaker: So be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a thing.
