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Episode 9 - An Interview with Nanea Reeves, CEO and Founder of TRIPP
19 Plays19 days ago
Nanea Reeves brings over 15 years experience in digital distribution, video game technologies and mobile application development. Nanea Reeves is the CEO & Co-Founder of TRIPP, a new start-up focused on creating mood altering experiences in VR.
Prior to founding TRIPP, Nanea was President & COO of TextPlus, one of the top mobile communications applications on iOS and Android platforms.
Before joining TextPlus, Nanea was the COO of Machinima, an online video network focused on video games. Nanea has also served as Chief Strategy and Product Officer at Gaikai, a cloud gaming company acquired by Sony Playstation. Previous to Gaikai, Nanea was SVP/COO, Global Online for Electronic Arts, and SVP of Enabling Technologies of JAMDAT Mobile, a mobile games company that EA acquired in 2006.
Nanea is very committed to supporting the evolution of the technology sector in Los Angeles and has worked as an Advisor and Angel Investor with many exciting So-Cal start-ups including Oculus, All Day, Haku, and Saucey.
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Transcript
Holiday Excitement and Travel Tales
00:00:15
Speaker
Well, Nenea, happy holidays. were a I think it's T-minus nine days till Christmas. Not that I'm counting. um How was the Sacred Sights tour in Iceland where i I saw you a few weeks back?
00:00:32
Speaker
ah You should have joined us. It was actually kind of amazing. i mean I think Tristan did a really great job. I really enjoyed spending time with Runa, the guide she brought along. And it was a beautiful way to see Iceland through that lens of their history with this with the island. And ah also just to hear the lore, especially that Runa had grown up with, who she was very much native to Iceland. So yeah, it was a fascinating experience. And
00:01:12
Speaker
It was a little bit kind of like a honeymoon for me and Jeff as well. So we haven't had the time to take um to really celebrate after getting married in June and just because of work demands for both of us. And so having to be there for your event as well as the Unity kind Conference in Barcelona, and dragged Jeff along. Oh, okay. How was that?
00:01:43
Speaker
It was great, actually. And Tristan's guide, Runa, gave us a beautiful blessing at this a little teeny church out near the edge of the water. It it was really lovely.
00:01:58
Speaker
Very cool. Yeah, i was... up I was very much on the fence. it's It's kind of hard for me to want to enjoy those things without having my wife along as well. And so ah and and i haven't really seen Iceland outside of Reykjavik, that i is on the to-do list. But yeah you I want to go back with my wife when we have a couple weeks to just drive around.
00:02:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's ah it's a beautiful country that, weirdly enough, reminded me a lot of Hawaii. despite the temperature difference. so Yeah, well, it's an island. Volcanic, yeah. Well, you can go it you can go up to the top of Haleakala and get some snow sometimes. Yeah, yeah, that's
Family Dynamics and Heritage
00:02:43
Speaker
true. So well so speaking of Hawaii, let's because I can't recall exactly where you grew up, whether it was ah in California or Hawaii or a combination.
00:02:54
Speaker
Well, it was kind of California, Hawaii, ah New York, Toronto, some early years in Europe, and even the Middle East and Beirut.
00:03:07
Speaker
um So what what drove all that hopping around as a young child? Yeah, there's, um
00:03:17
Speaker
you know, i'm I'm part Asian and Hawaiian. I'm Hawaiian, Chinese, Irish, and Welsh. And there's some rumors of Norwegian sailor blood in us, as well as Italian on my mother's side. And um so both of my grandmothers, their second husbands, were Jewish. and those were the ones i grew up with as my grandfather ah so it was just kind of a very eclectic childhood but because my grandmother was uh hawaiian chinese the tendency to have the family all live together you know aunts uncles cousins right community it it's very much a part of our culture and so my grand
00:04:12
Speaker
parents were always in the picture and my grandfather was head of worldwide sales for britannica encyclopedia and he was very innovative very innovative and so we traveled around a lot for his work and he would set up sales organizations in different territories that's um uh and and eventually he also became ah ah a commercial real estate developer which is how He ended up in Toronto.
00:04:44
Speaker
And ah in in addition to that, my mother always struggled with drugs, ah ah drug addiction. I personally believe she was trying to self-medicate her a mental illness. um ah So it it made me and my sisters very vulnerable and the grandparents on both sides of our family would swoop in and, um, uh, take me and my sisters, you know, uh, to get us out of peril. And then, so that, that contributed to a lot of the bouncing around going from different relatives, spending summers with different aunts and,
00:05:30
Speaker
But I'm grateful for having that extended community for sure. And it shows the importance ah for that, especially when when there are problems within a family. And I worry about a lot of the young people today who don't have those extended families and and really strong communities around them because I could see how it really was beneficial for me.
00:05:59
Speaker
it does seem a little bit like, um, the economy is almost st driving a little bit of that, uh, family communal living again. um you know, young adults, you know having to stay home and and living with their parents, you know, just because of the cost of living and so forth. And, um, but, uh, but no, well, my, my wife's family lives, you know, within three blocks of each other, her, her parents and her, uh,
00:06:25
Speaker
two sisters and and a couple of her brothers. So they're yeah very, very close knit. um ah Just ah ah want to circle back for me. So both of your grandparents, ah your your grandmother's second husbands, both both your mother and your father, both married Jewish men in their second marriages. And is that by coincidence or some kind of relationship between those two gentlemen? Yeah, I know. I think the,
00:06:55
Speaker
And it's it's really strange because my grandmother, who is Hawaiian Chinese, um you know, it was a big deal for her to get divorced. And for her to marry someone, you know, completely different faith, different culture is also a pretty big deal if you know a lot about the Hawaiian um culture. And we're very much sort of bloodline lineage.
00:07:23
Speaker
Yeah. ah oriented and, um ah you know, yeah who who what what family you're from is probably the most important status you could have in the Hawaiian culture as opposed to how much money you've made or, do you know, what you've been able to achieve academically.
00:07:42
Speaker
and so i think, you know, one, it was just very innovative to grow up with a mixed cultural environment You know, we always celebrated Hanukkah and Christmas. I love that. At one point, I actually told my grandpa I wanted to be Jewish because somehow I had perceived that ah because both both of their families were so tight and... I had this concept that they treated their children better than what I was seeing from my own mother, that I said, I want to go to Hebrew school. I want to i want to be Jewish now. and like i did I did not want to go to Hebrew school.
00:08:26
Speaker
yeah Well, I got very upset after a couple weeks of going when I found out that there's a prayer that gets said where you think,
00:08:36
Speaker
God, you weren't born a woman. And, you know, i it it it really upset me. And I came home crying and I said, don't want to go back there anymore. And my grandfather said, you don't have to. so Yeah. Well, yeah. And and women are good in very, ah you know, Orthodox Jewish families. um Yeah. Women are are treated very second class, unfortunately.
00:09:03
Speaker
Yeah, that seems to be... Both both in New York and and and you know parts of Israel. But deep this is ultra-Orthodox that
Overcoming Personal Challenges
00:09:12
Speaker
we're talking about. um and And which island did you grow up on for the majority of the time? well Well, the Reeves family and my grandmother's family, which they're the Victor family. They're both pretty prominent Hawaiian families there. they're They pretty much cover all the islands. ah ah We could say the Maui um faction that is
00:09:39
Speaker
you know, sometimes different factions of the family host the family reunions. That would be the smallest one. And it's about 350. So it kind of gives you an idea. But, you know, you spend most of your time on Oahu and then different times of the year. In August, we would all go to Kauai. Okay. And then spend a lot because it's about 10 degrees cooler than the other islands. And then uh, sometimes people, would spend Christmas on the big Island.
00:10:14
Speaker
And, uh, so, you know, just, we'd bounce around from one Island to the other, but centralized mostly on Oahu. How did you like, uh, Toronto?
00:10:26
Speaker
I love Toronto. Toronto is an awesome city. Uh, it, um, yeah, it's, I loved it. I think, uh, um,
00:10:37
Speaker
it's gone through a lot of changes. i haven't been there in recent years, but I loved it. ive i felt like um it had a very eclectic community where we lived. We lived in the Bay Yorkville area around Yorkville Avenue. And it was a lot of fun. I have really fond memories of these massive, neighborhood hide-and-go-seek games you know you think about like as kids like we were hiding oops sorry for i banged the microphone that's okay as kids we would uh during the summer just play hide-and-go-seek for hours into the evening and run and hide in construction sites and running across beams i mean you think about like
00:11:30
Speaker
ah The fearlessness that we had as kids back then, it was a lot of fun. had a great time there. And and so you mentioned ah growing up with with couples, sisters. How many siblings did you have growing up?
00:11:43
Speaker
I have one sister, my sister Vicki, who's full-blooded sister. And then I have a half-sister named Laura. We have different fathers.
00:11:55
Speaker
Okay. And where are you in the oldest, youngest, in the middle? I'm the oldest, and I think the because of my mother's addiction problems, I definitely grew up with this huge sense of responsibility for both of my sisters. And, you know, as a child, I had the sense that I was constantly failing ah in taking care of them, do you know?
00:12:22
Speaker
So it's something that I definitely look back at to try to understand more how that has changed influenced me as an adult, you know, and has shaped me in positive ways, but also I think some ah things to areas to evolve as it were.
00:12:43
Speaker
and And were you still kind of moving ah between cities during your your teens and and later teens? ah ah Later teens, I pretty much ended up in Los Angeles. okay i came i came to Los Angeles when I was 14.
00:13:02
Speaker
and um by that time, I was having my own problems with drugs and alcohol, as was my sister, Vicki. And she was 12. And
00:13:16
Speaker
ah And we were living with my mother at that time, and it was not my mom's best time for, you know, just being a parent. So we came to this big city, and in many ways, we're kind of living on our own, you know, unsupervised and...
00:13:38
Speaker
It was very challenging and i had a few experiences happened to me that were pretty traumatic as did my sister. And I ended up in a mental health hospital as a result of it. I was age 15.
00:13:57
Speaker
And um you know you look back and you have a hindsight on certain experiences and you realize, This was the biggest blessing in my life, rat ah cloaked as this epic tragedy. and And the reason for that was there was a therapist there. Her name was Victoria Riskin. She was the one I got assigned to after. And she a wonderful woman. I had the good fortune of connecting with her right after she had done this trip to Nepal.
00:14:35
Speaker
where she had met these Tibetan monks there living in exile and they taught her ah Tibetan meditation techniques. And I think she had already ah been exposed to doing Vipassana meditation. um But during one of our sessions, I was having an anxiety attack, a pretty significant panic attack and she had me do this breathing technique she had learned there called kumye and you visualize the breath coming in through the mouth and the nose at the same time and the breath going through the nose going to the mind the mind's eye to kind of quiet it and Going through the mouth the breath bringing that inhale down into the heart to quiet the chest and you know many times when we do have anxiety it does centralize in the chest in many ways from a physical reaction and it had this immediate tonic effect on me and
00:15:52
Speaker
i ah She saw it and it it became part of my toolkit. In our session, she would guide me through really short meditation practices that became longer and longer. And she even invited me, she and another therapist were doing a weekend retreat. It was one of those day retreats where you spend all day there and then you go home at night and it was in silence.
00:16:25
Speaker
Um, And I mean, that really started my whole journey on changing how I believe that learning that practice at that age, at that time in my life, rewired my entire decision framework.
00:16:43
Speaker
It allowed me to insert this pause of reflection prior to a reaction. And that simple insertion changed everything for me.
00:16:57
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of a lot of people never learn that at all in their entire lives. how You definitely see it on Facebook nowadays. Well, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, anywhere. But even even just ah just living everyday life, it ain't easy. And having having the wherewithal to be able to take a step back and take a breath um is ah is not easy for for a lot of people.
00:17:25
Speaker
Yeah, and also just to... Understand that that little pause gives you agency on how you are going to react to whatever is unfolding in your experience in front of you.
00:17:41
Speaker
And, so you know, one thing I'll just say to what I found was, you know, my sister, Vicki, she couldn't do that.
00:17:53
Speaker
ah It never, it was a gift. She was never, um she was never able to achieve that state. Her head was very loud and it was almost like I was watching the alternate reality of my life in her life if I hadn't met that woman at that time.
00:18:19
Speaker
Well, I do. Uh, I mean, I know, know, having met you a few years ago, ah you know, was a family situation that, that, uh, just, you know, helped me connect with you, uh, frankly. And, uh, you know, losing my, my sister was, uh, at the eight, and I was 16 and she was 23 and that had a, a huge impact on my life. Um, and, uh, you know, and i lost my mother three years later. Uh, so,
00:18:48
Speaker
ah But yeah, it's different. You were so young. Yeah. Well, and she didn't get the help she needed either. um She was dealing with a lot of mental issues and some schizophrenia and manic depression mixed in. And and my parents were you know, going through divorce at the time and and a really bad divorce.
00:19:07
Speaker
But, and and ah of the four of us, I'm i'm the
Career Beginnings and Passion for Games
00:19:11
Speaker
youngest. shia She definitely got the worst of it or or or the the least amount of care during that period. Was she the oldest?
00:19:21
Speaker
No, she was a ah second youngest. so is we'd Like my sister. Yeah, two older brothers, about 10 and eight years older than than myself, who i'm I'm still very close with.
00:19:33
Speaker
um So in your, ah
00:19:39
Speaker
tell me a a little bit about kind of finding yourself, I guess, in your late teens, early twenties and, and, and how did you kind of, were you a video gamer growing up at nine, 10 years old or that come a little later? It came a little later, probably when I was about 13, 14 and I would,
00:20:00
Speaker
hang out in the arcades in Waikiki and Westwood Village. What were some of your favorite arcade games growing up? Stand up. definitely Definitely Asteroids, for sure. Okay. um And then I have a um a fun desk. I actually just released it, but it was made out of a Defender.
00:20:24
Speaker
arcade machine and it was super fun. An artist made it. I just released it though after moving and just wanting to kind of streamline who my material things all around me. yeah You had the whole cabinet or something or a side of it. Yeah. yeah It was a desk made out of a machine ah deconstructed. it was super cool. I'd love to see a picture that. Defender was a fantastic arcade game.
00:20:56
Speaker
Yeah. to you know i liked all I played all of them. Tempest. But Asteroids was really my thing because what I saw in Asteroids which unlocked a lot of things for me was there was a ah moment where I could see the pattern.
00:21:16
Speaker
And once I identified the pattern in the the games and the levels and the movement, ah it was like this huge light bulb moment. and then, you you know, you could see it when Pac-Man came out you could see the pattern and And be you know play off one quarter for a really long time. i never I never got to that kind of ah capability. with I mean, i I spent a lot of quarters and a lot of arcade games, but i never i don't think I ever recognized a pattern of the asteroids. um
00:21:51
Speaker
my yo know My success with but button mashing and just trying to keep up as best I could. Yeah, I think we all start off that way, but there are definitely... is a pattern, ah that's how they're designed. And, um, and I found, ah you know, ah now I know it was probably triggering some kind of flow state in me that I looked at more as, um, a respite where my head would quiet down. I would focus on the task in front of me. you also have this sense of agency.
00:22:31
Speaker
over how you feel when you play video games and, and agency over the environment in many ways, once, once you get to a certain point and the knowledge from playing one game to the next is cumulative in many ways. Um, ah you know, because there are mechanics that are consistent throughout. And so it was super fascinating to me and,
00:22:59
Speaker
living in Los Angeles, you know, i was a cute girl. So everybody was like, you should be an actor. And, uh, you know, i did ah a few commercials, but I was, uh, not, I was always kind of a little nerdy. So do you remember some of the the commercials? Did they air?
00:23:19
Speaker
yeah, I did one for AT&T, which was some kind of infrastructure, um, experience There was, ah I was some kind of office worker and this flood came in. it was, and then another one I did was for Nike um ah that um I think it pissed off PETA because there was a, yeah there was a pie that went into the face of a stuffed dog.
00:23:51
Speaker
deer head. Not that the sneakers were made of leather. Yeah, right, exactly. It was a funny commercial, though. It was directed by these two brothers. and you know but That was back in the day where you would get these massive checks as a young person doing them. ah But then ah most of my friends in Los Angeles who that in that community and theater and acting, they would earn a living through ah waiting tables or bartending.
00:24:28
Speaker
And I could do graphic design on computers. I did it, ah you know, I was always into computers. and So just can you tell me like what you were talking about?
00:24:43
Speaker
It was a long time ago. Late or early Late early 90s.
00:24:55
Speaker
Late 80s. Late Apple, 2E, 2C, early PCs. ye ah Mostly Apple for the graphic design, working with programs like Quark and early Photoshop.
00:25:11
Speaker
ah After Effects, those kind of things. do and were you And you were just kind of self-taught on the... what Now, would you call yourself a graphic designer or an illustrator or is more kind of... Back then, I was more of a graphic designer. And okay it was all self-taught. And I would make stuff for myself.
00:25:30
Speaker
um ah And people say, oh, would you do that for me? And pretty soon, i was working at movie advertising agencies and um uh i always ended up in management even uh uh with this theater group i was in you know i would uh audition and get in and then i'd end up on the management team so i think systems thinking is something that uh i i seem to be just more naturally ah oriented towards and yeah everything's self-taught i um
00:26:09
Speaker
made some fits and starts to go to college. But there I think there was a part of me that knew if I did um that there was something that wasn't ah right for me and who I was and how I learned.
00:26:25
Speaker
Right. i You know, when I was a little kid, my grandparents put me in Montessori school and I whipped through, they had these packets, they were color coded. I almost feel like it was a game in and of itself. And you would self-direct yourself through these packets. And I went through two years worth of packets in less than six months.
00:26:47
Speaker
And I ended up skipping, um it was like a grade and a half. I started off in fourth grade and ended up in sixth grade by the end of the year. And I don't think they do that now because of the social impact on kids but at that time like i I felt like I was having a hard time with how slow the curriculum was in school and i would get really bored super easily and I would also challenge ah the teachers in the lessons in a way that ah they didn't really like and because you because you were questioning them yeah
00:27:31
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, you know, and some of it was to provoke cause I was a little bit of a shit. Um, but the other one was, you know, ah sometimes I would see some logic gaps in the, uh, you know, and, um, I went to an all girls school in Hawaii, the same one my grandmother went to. And I had some amazing teachers at that school.
00:27:54
Speaker
And, um, uh, But there was something deep inside of me that I knew if I stayed in academia for me, it would change who I was as a person and not for the not for the better.
00:28:12
Speaker
Right. And as I'm not advocating that for other people. Obviously, there's huge benefits to formal education. My late husband, Vic,
00:28:27
Speaker
his cousin was this amazing high school teacher. And, you was always kind of ashamed of my lack of formal education for many years. i mean, now I have enough of a track record that, you know, and also an understanding that my journey unfolded in the way that was right for me. But Vic's cousin had said to me that he had seen so many students, you know, during his career as a teacher, especially in high school, by that time you can see who the individual is. And he said that there were, he recognized in me some children that school in and of itself could, or some ah young adults, which I was getting into in high school, um that it was actually like not good for them.
00:29:25
Speaker
ah in the way that curriculum unfolds. If I had to take a guess, I would guess that the girl school you went to was was very good and probably gave you the majority of the skills that you needed. 100%. Yeah.
00:29:43
Speaker
yeah Yeah. Because I, you know, if I went to, private but I was the only one in my family went to private school, Quaker school, know, when my parents were having rough time. But And I didn't really appreciate very much until I got to college ah how well-rounded that education was. um And I don't think without it I i i would have. because i and And today, you know i I teach part-time now in college. And I see, unfortunately, I see so many students that that don't have a lot of critical thinking skills and yeah and some basics that you would think they they would have. um Yeah, why is that, do you think?
00:30:22
Speaker
Oh, gosh. i I really, well, I just don't think our education system is designed for the world we live in today. And it's it's so much on memorization. And i mean, you know. I saw that even as a young young kid. I mean, I was never good on the theory side of things. And I was really not you know, a terribly strong math student and, and I was much more applied. And if I honestly, if it wasn't for a couple of, ah of um side projects outside of class, um you know, I may not have made it through because, ah you know, i I needed something hands on and and applied to feel ah to just to learn better. um And I think that's what's missing in a lot of the education today, unfortunately. It it it seems like it's not so much in college, but more in, elementary and, and high school.
00:31:19
Speaker
Well, but that's when it's the most important. Yes. Yes. Uh, but I do think that we're on the verge of seeing a revolution, a revolutionary, um, transformation of the education system with AI being able to adapt to the child directly, uh, in much the same way that, um,
00:31:45
Speaker
I experienced at Montessori school really early on. do you know I also, I mean, to be fair, i because of my grandfather, every house we had, i had a full reference library to access. Yes, you had the most latest your version of the Britannica. We had Britannica growing up as well. yeah And I relied on that a lot for ah book reports yeah when I was in fifth and sixth grade. I had the luxury of being able to cut them up.
00:32:14
Speaker
for book reports because there were always older versions I could cut up and, uh, cause they were always being replaced. So I was very, very fortunate in that area. So I think a lot of like what saved me specifically was, uh, um, learning how to find out things and yeah learning how to, ah figure things out. And some of that I had to do just to,
00:32:43
Speaker
they you know, figure out how to feed my sisters and I when my mom was out of it. And but there's something about that curiosity of finding things out that I think is the most exciting thing about life in and of itself, like asking the questions and then trying to figure out how do we do this? You know, is it possible?
00:33:09
Speaker
I guess I want to ask a little bit of a personal question. I mean, you've you've already been very open already. um Was there a point where your your mother and and your sister were kind of able to get on by themselves and you were able to start focusing and taking care of yourself? Or was that always a a big part of your growing up and and and early adulthood?
00:33:35
Speaker
It was a big part of my whole life until they each passed away. And, you know, in many ways, um
00:33:45
Speaker
I've always felt a tremendous responsibility for them. With my sister, I definitely have many regrets. And
00:33:59
Speaker
one of them, the biggest regret I have with my sister is You know, I've been, ah one of the choices I made very early on was to um get sober and get into recovery. I could see that my use of drugs and alcohol at a very young age weren't good for me. It was part of the better decisions I started making in my life. and ah and but and I watched my sister self-destruct. She became this terrible alcoholic and then ultimately alcohol stopped working and she turned to harder things and, you know, she overdosed in 2012. I just passed the anniversary of that on December seventh and
00:34:50
Speaker
ah I'm sorry. The one time, thank you, Bob. I know I'm not alone in that. I know many, many, many families struggle with having at least one of their family members suffer from addiction. And it is a family illness in many ways. And when Vicki died, you know, about a year before, a year and a half before she died,
00:35:19
Speaker
She was in the hospital after a very brutal act of violence. you know when When you do drugs at the level that she did, it makes you very vulnerable to predators. And and her whole life, she had been like that, you know being a child,
00:35:38
Speaker
with a mother that was checked out, both of us were vulnerable to predators. And Vicki was in the hospital for about a month. And when she came out, my husband and i went to Hawaii. She was living in her family house in Honolulu. And she it was the only time I saw her willing to get sober. And we had tried to take her to 12-step meetings and and get her into rehab and were willing to pay for it. And she just she would try, and it just didn't connect with her.
00:36:16
Speaker
And she had done some research at the time on the ibogaine treatment. And she was saying, I want to go to this clinic in Mexico and do ibogaine. And um we had never heard of it.
00:36:32
Speaker
We were very against it coming from, you know, more traditional 12 step recovery paths and We said, no, that's not how you deal with this. We're not going to pay for you to go to some clinic in Mexico to do psychedelics. Like, uh, no, you, you have to go to rehab. And she was begging us. She had done the research. She really thought it was the thing for her. And we were so close minded.
00:37:03
Speaker
And, you know, a year and a half later, she was dead. And um, really big teaching moment for me in a gut punch was many years after that, after Trip got funded, one of our investors, Tim Chang, who's been our first supporter in venture capital, he um said, I want you to meet my friend, Martine.
00:37:38
Speaker
who runs this amazing clinic in Mexico. He's built this cool breathing application that uses augmented reality, and he wants to show it to you.
00:37:50
Speaker
And when I met him, and he was telling me what he did, I realized that he was one of the medical doctors who worked at that clinic that my sister, he was ah actually founder of the clinic and with Joseph Barsuglia, who is a a wonderful um research scientist in in the psychedelic space. And, you know, Vicki would likely have been under great care with those two people at this clinic. But, you know, i because I was so um rigid in my thinking on how you deal with addiction, that I was really close minded to any alternate approach. And, it's a moment I really regret, uh, in, in a big way. And, um, I don't know if it would have saved her life, but, you know, I mean, i I understand. Well, I understand why you, you feel that way. I, you know,
00:38:59
Speaker
it's, uh, but you were trying to protect her as well. And, and, you know, I, I would, I would steer from ah away from that, you know, thinking of, of rigid thinking. It's, it's, it's just the, you know, what you learn, what you thought were traditional know best methods for getting clean, um, you know, ah experimental, I mean, there's experimental stuff all the time, all over the world. Um, it's, it's hard to know what's, what's valid and what's not. And, and, uh, you know,
00:39:29
Speaker
yeah experimental stuff can kill you as well. So i yeah I understand why you why you're have that regret, but i i would i would not be too hard on yourself about that. I think you were, you know, at the time doing the best you could. Yeah, I appreciate that, Bob. That's actually super helpful because, you know, with the anniversary being really recent, I've been thinking about it a lot. And then also, you know, with the rise of psychedelic science and the research happening in there, you know, I'm not an advocate for those solutions. I don't know enough about um all the benefits and the applications, and I think it's an area still evolving.
00:40:21
Speaker
But I do think that we live in an amazing time right now when you think about how technology can be used to measure the impact of these alternative treatments and solutions that can be crafted that are more personalized to the person themselves.
00:40:47
Speaker
um you know, it gives me a lot of hope that maybe the impact that my family has had could be somewhat reduced for other families. I think about that a lot.
00:41:04
Speaker
Well, I think that's why those people that choose to work in healthcare care or or similar feel, you know, want to, you know, the vast majority when I have a ah positive impact on on people, some sometimes it's driven from you know, personal history and, and, uh, and sometimes it's just driven from, know, wanting to, you know, better the world. I think, um, you know, one thing I've, I struggle with sometimes, uh, when, uh, when you're, when you're, when you're doing anything for, for good and you're trying to help people and you want to, you know, um, at the end of the day, i do, I think sometimes people get too focused on hitting a home run,
00:41:42
Speaker
And sometimes, ah you know, singles can be enough. And and what I tell people, you know, a lot of times I think you have to take ah comfort in helping just one person.
00:41:54
Speaker
um yeah And because if honestly, if everyone just tried to help one person, one other person, family member, you know, friend, stranger, yeah know things would be yeah quite a bit different situation. We don't have to boil the ocean. Yeah, I want to talk to you about that in more detail. Do you mind if I take a little break just for a second?
00:42:17
Speaker
Yeah, no, I'm going to go ahead and pause us right now. Okay. Okay, so we're back after that that brief bio break. Thanks. it did Was there somewhere you wanted to go or or you want me to ah redirect conversation?
00:42:33
Speaker
I think we were talking about community, right? We were talking about community. I was talking about that, um you know, when working in health health care, that, you know, I think sometimes you have to focus on one person, one patient at a time instead of trying to worry about solving everyone's ailment.
00:42:54
Speaker
Yeah, I think um there's something about bringing people together that really fascinates me. i think ultimately that's what I really loved about theater.
00:43:10
Speaker
It's what I loved about building software. It's, ah you know, it's what I really enjoy about business is, you know, just bringing people together to solve a problem.
00:43:25
Speaker
And i I think that there's something really cool when you think about opportunities of how to give people a sense of purpose and mission, uh, using technology. It's an idea that I'm noodling right now, on how to kind of evolve trip. And, you know, you see kind of like the internet, uh,
00:43:55
Speaker
online communities, how they can be super toxic, but they can also be pretty amazing when you look at things like the Human Genome Project. And even in the early days, I definitely, I don't know if you had it the SETI um application on your desktop. no I do remember it. think I may have played with what it once or twice because I think that started on the Apple II, I remember right. Yeah. Yeah, and then also the, um you know, you think about like, I remember being using Napster. It was really funny moment. I was downloading music. And then LimeWire. Yeah, but but with Napster, ah well, the the irony of it was I was working at a web development shop that we were coding the
00:44:49
Speaker
RIAA website, you know, which was trying to stop Napster. really? Okay. And all of us working on it were using Napster to download music and, you because we were all young people. It was really funny. But um there was an interesting moment because in Napster, a lot of people don't talk about this. They just talk about, like, free file downloading. But there were these social features. we They had implemented this little chat feature that uh you know when you connect it to someone's computer to search their music file folder that they had put on napster um you know because that's how it worked it was peer-to-peer yeah transactions and network it was like a a mesh network in in many ways and um
00:45:41
Speaker
But I was ah downloading some French music from someone's computer in France. I was downloading Francoise Zardy. Yeah. Because I was an an eclectic young person. and ah And this guy pops in on the chat in French.
00:46:00
Speaker
And ah starts talking to me. Well, I didn't know what he was saying, despite even living in Canada for a while. My French wasn't that evolved. So I i went on, I think it was Alta Vista Babelfish something like that. yeah Cut and paste what he was saying and ah and then had it translate my response and send it back to him.
00:46:26
Speaker
He said, oh, you French is very good. and ah And, ah you know, and this was like a long time ago, right? and But you think about like how remarkable that moment was. There was another thing too that my, on the Irish side of my family, my great-great-grandparents were well-known songwriters. My great-great-grandmother, Maude Nugent, Jerome, she wrote Sweet Rosie O'Grady and they were vaudevillians they were also founding members of ASCAP the first 100 and Billy Jerome and Maude Nugent Jerome and I was able on Napster to find ah brown files of brown wax uh cylinder recordings of their music and so it was really kind of the beginning I think for me of seeing the potential of how people can connect in unique and different ways that in physical reality, you can't just, they're not physically possible. I can't go to everyone's house and search for their music collection. And so I've always been fascinated by thinking about like how do you use these technologies in ways that
00:47:50
Speaker
will enable new experiences. And one of the things I've seen in the VR community from the beginning is a tendency to want to replicate or simulate ah ah the physical reality. And it it never is as evolved, right? You don't have the olfactory inputs. You don't have the tactile inputs. You know, is they're not fully baked with what we experience in the physical world. And, um but there's all kinds of cool things you can do if you think like, well, what can this technology enable for me that I can't do in the physical world? And that's how we approach a lot of the design work with Trip. But really like that Napster moment was something for me. it was kind of like recognizing
00:48:46
Speaker
the patterns in asteroids you started to look at. like So i I have to say, learning I mean, talking about Napster, you know, I so i did college radio um and it was a lot of fun. And, you know, every... every maybe every every couple months or so I start, you know I'm just thinking about, i mean, it's just, I mean, you know, as great as Napster and and Spotify, you know, are as platforms, it's kind of amazing and a little bit upsetting at the same time, the impact that it's had on on the music industry. um and i And I think more about, you know, independent artists and it's now, it's so hard now to discover music
00:49:31
Speaker
um And i for independent artists to make a living, it's now now it's all based on live music, unless they've got you know huge you know listeners on on Spotify. But I mean, that's just in the entire industry that yeah was pretty much yeah know one way for, you know what, 70, 80 years, you know almost you know completely you know non-existent today.
00:49:57
Speaker
Yeah, and you know my mother's side of the family very much in the music industry, right? there um my One of my grandpas, he was head of A&R at Motown and was a music producer.
00:50:16
Speaker
ah He was a music producer um very early on, produced Dale Shannon, Runaway, discovered Rodriguez, um the Little Willie John, like, you know, in the 50s, he had a lot of hit records. um I will say, though, that you talk about artists making a living, but even then, the artists didn't make as much as the record companies did.
00:50:44
Speaker
And many of them broke, right?
00:50:48
Speaker
yeah, it's, uh, I, yeah, i mean, we could say whether it's better than, than it is now, but, uh, so let me, let me, let me steer us back a bit before we, you know, cause I, I don't want to, I want to talk about trip, but i don't want to talk about trip too much just yet. Cause I'm still trying to understand, um your, ah segue into the, the video game industry. And I, and, you know, I, I saw that you were,
00:51:15
Speaker
product manager at eToys, which I remember wonderfully, but was unfortunately, you know, really one of the yeah companies that bid it during the the crash.
00:51:28
Speaker
and ah And so, and I'm kind of curious, what were you doing around this period at eToys and then the transition to Jamdat? And when I saw Jamdat, that was like, um i i ah i I sent you that. I was employee number four there. Employee number four. You're kidding. yeah where were they Were they headquartered out UK or were they out of LA? No, no. LA. Okay.
00:51:57
Speaker
So at that web development shop that I was working that my friend Karen Reed started. Karen was an art director at a graphic design studio and She split off to start her own web design company, and I went to go work for her.
00:52:17
Speaker
And ah we did a lot of really cool websites we did. Fox Interactive. We did the Sony Pictures Entertainment site. It was like a company of 14 people. ah We did that RIA site. We did the Earthlink Start page um for Sky Dayton. And then he started an LA Tech incubator called E-Companies with Jake Weinbaum, who was at Disney for a while. And um ah he ah they bought Karen's company.
00:52:54
Speaker
to be the strategic development group at e-companies, which was an la tech incubator. And I got a check during that acquisition that was the biggest check I'd ever received in my life. i mean, it wasn't life-changing, but for a really young person, was like, wow, I can ski every weekend if I want all winter. And I went out and bought a a truck, a sports,
00:53:23
Speaker
track, a Ford Explorer sport track with cash. and he did like my only My only new car ever was a 94 Ford Explorer. Yeah, they're great cars i i drove it I drove it for, i put 260,000 miles on it. Oh, that's awesome. It died on the Beltway in DC back in, and I haven't owned a car since. ah Not that I don't want to, but I haven't had a strong need and in downtown Washington, but Well, you know, that experience for me was another really groundbreaking data point for me is that there's a different way to make money in the world as opposed to just getting hired and getting a salary. And i went, wow. And so it was the best job ever because they um had Karen's team
00:54:19
Speaker
prototype startup ideas and then they had a management team that would sit with us and we would mock up these startups e-toys ah and not e-parties was one of them and um ah and then we would evaluate whether they should get funded or not and so it was like the best experience ever And ah um i did I went to go work on eParties, and we launched, and eCompany shut us down six weeks later because we just weren't getting the traction.
00:55:01
Speaker
And I was sobbing. It took six weeks. and Dave Haddad was the CEO of eParties. just left Warner Brothers after many years of being president of Interactive there. He ah had worked at Mattel and I had worked on the Hot Wheels site for Mattel when I was at Karen's company venue. And anyway, ah Dave and I went and sold the assets for eParties to eToys. That's how I ended up at eToys. So I started my startup career with an epic failure.
00:55:39
Speaker
And, ah you know, that was kind of awesome to get out of the way. Do you know? And as they were shutting us down at e-companies,
00:55:51
Speaker
ah they said to me, you know, after you and Dave do the integration, we want you to consider coming back and working with us on this new a cell phone game company that Sprint is giving us some money to start off. Okay. Yeah. So, okay. So now I got to, I got to make a little connection for you here just in parallel. Yeah. so Yeah. So, you know, let me, you know, digress just for two minutes. Yeah, because I saw that website you sent me, cool website of the day. I totally remember it. I think you featured Gladiator. you making that up?
00:56:26
Speaker
No, no, you featured Gladiator on it. Yeah, so so so you were you were you were in LA on the West Coast and you know evaluating you startups. I was, um so in 90, I think it was 98 or maybe it was 99, but i I ended up ah contracting for a small company and in Northern Virginia called Nascent Technologies. It's like six people, but they they were making... ah they were selling large web-based email systems for telcos. And, ah um you know, it was like, like, you know, if a telco had its own Hotmail platform.
00:57:06
Speaker
um And so I ended up doing some field engineering for them and and was enjoying it. um And then they got bought ah like within a couple months from ah CMGI.
00:57:17
Speaker
Oh, yeah and yeah. And then you mentioned AltaVista earlier. CMDI bought AltaVista and they bought Pets.com. I still have a hand puppet in my storage locker. And they bought you know they bought like 50 company furniture.com and they were out of ah headquarter Andover, Mass.
00:57:41
Speaker
um And so I ended up with a full-time job through this acquisition and they were you know they had they set up an an office in Northern Virginia CMGI. And they were trying to you know ah put together like yo know five, six acquisitions and try to come up with a um well, a common strategy and and and and get people to like each other and so forth from different companies. but And they had me doing, um I was doing early wireless internet research, you know, on cell phones um as they were kind of figuring out that business. i ah And, you know, prior to that, had a lot of experience in cellular networking and cellular network planning.
00:58:24
Speaker
And, um but I was so bored ah with the job. They just, know, there was no direction. They didn't really direct me very well. And so I started, i started cool app website of the day out of my cubicle. And I was just doing reviews, you know once a day, first gen, know, websites and all those, you know, little black and white pixels.
00:58:46
Speaker
um But I was really surprised, like so six months in I was getting 10,000 hits a day by the, you know, and the industry reading it. And I actually, and you and you mentioned Sprint, I actually got our content on Sprint's phone deck.
00:58:58
Speaker
um and Fidonet out of Canada. And i was I was just talking to somebody the other day, actually when I was in Brussels last week, that I um i did a compilation, a little book compilation of like 60 of those articles. ive if I'll have to send you one. I still have a few. And um Sorry, did you hear that ringing?
00:59:20
Speaker
Or did only I hear that ringing? You did. Okay. so I thought I had that. Well, that's the integration of the Apple iPhone into your OS and and it's everything's so tied in.
00:59:32
Speaker
ah Anyway, ah I'll try and try and cut that part out. um And... Yeah. And i was I debuted that book at, I went to the Mobile World Congress in 2001 in Stockholm.
00:59:46
Speaker
It was my my one time in Stockholm. um but ah And then the crash happened. um And thankfully, I didn't own any any CMGI stock. But then I segued into conservation for 10 years and and gave up on on the internet.
01:00:02
Speaker
so So back to you now and Jamdat. I didn't give up. I didn't give yeah. um No, and then Jamdat was a leading ah player in those early early ah mobile games.
01:00:18
Speaker
I mean, job i would say when Java, yeah you're trying building for Java I remember J2ME and Brew, which was Qualcomm's platform. That's right. Prior to that, we had Gladiator, which was a multiplayer WAP game. It was very innovative.
01:00:39
Speaker
And we hit our year-end numbers by noon the first day because we didn't even know how to forecast our um you know future on that. We would compare it against web websites, ah but I mean, you so you were you were at the very beginning of that at mobile growth.
01:01:02
Speaker
Oh, yeah. And people laugh us out of the room. Oh, I know. And I remember the very first, some of the first experiments in video streaming. And now to see how it is today, it's just unbelievable.
01:01:17
Speaker
Well, we did some of that even at Venue. We did QuickTime videos. ah video downloads that were short form and ah tried to do some streaming stuff.
01:01:33
Speaker
um We were going to work on the Apple QuickTime website. That was like one of the last jobs we got, and ah ah but we didn't do it because we got acquired.
01:01:47
Speaker
But we were also making these little shockwave games. We made some for NBC and there was this the days of shockwave yeah brilliant digital entertainment uh bde was a company that we built a lot of little games and and websites for uh so you know it's it was kind of like an organic evolution getting into the game industry and uh they had e-companies that tapped me for
01:02:20
Speaker
Jamdat, the code name for it internally was Athens. It hadn't even been named Jamdat. We named it Jamdat because those were the first letters on the keypad, triple tap.
01:02:32
Speaker
Oh. ah So it would be that was back in the day where you had to triple tap text. And so we thought it would be easy to get to by, so it was kind of a made up name. Okay. uh, randomize, uh, just pump out all the words that. So, so just so to put it in perspective. So you were employee number four jam dad in middle of 2000. Right. And, and then EA or electron arts acquired it in, uh, six years later. Yeah. We went public before we got acquired. Oh, it did go public. Wow. Yeah. So we, I think we were the first mobile, um,
01:03:17
Speaker
content focused company ever to go public. And so, and how many employees were there when you got, when you were acquired? I think there was like 120 when we were acquired, but okay you know, one thing that was really, I mean, working for Mitch Lasky, he was CEO of Jamdebt and, you know, he's a very successful venture capital um capitalist after Jammed Out, he joined Benchmark Capital and he funded Snap, he funded Discord, he funded Riot Games. a Very innovative business leader. One of the most fun bosses I ever had and tough, tough to work for. Very demanding, but a lot of fun. Taught me the fun of business and
01:04:08
Speaker
really gave me a lot of opportunity at that company. He says it's because, you know, I mean, I was a bull in the china shop. I just I wanted to prove something to myself and everyone around me, maybe because I was very insecure.
01:04:27
Speaker
But I worked so hard and really loved what we were doing. got to just say, and you should take a lot of satisfaction in what you achieved like your first 10 years of your career. I mean, that, that's, that's pretty amazing. And without a formal, uh, college education and, um, not saying that that, that was a requirement anything, but, uh, and, and with the difficulties you had, I mean, that's, that's just unbelievable, know, going, taking a, going with a company that goes public and then gets acquired by electronic arts.
01:05:05
Speaker
Yeah. And, ah you know, that's a career right there. Yeah. And Mitch teed me up really well at EA, um, When he joined e they gave him mobile and EA Online to focus on. And he had Michael Marchetti run the mobile business and he had me run EA Online, which was essentially a cost center. And so my team built out a lot of the infrastructure needed for enabling digital revenue streams. They had a team come in after I left, to continue to evolve it, but a lot of that infrastructure is still in place and it drives a lot of their contribution margin. i reported into John Riccitello.
01:05:52
Speaker
oh Oh, I remember. Oh, so he's a founder of Unity. ah Well, no. yeah He was a CEO of Unity that took it public. Okay, okay. He was not the founder. Yeah. ah ah He came in and and scaled it, which is something John's really great at. And I had a lot of fun working for John as well. Mitch left EA and I stayed. I stayed for almost six years working.
01:06:27
Speaker
on cross-platform infrastructure and I loved it. I had a great time. I loved the games industry. The team at EA, I made lifelong friends from from that experience. I learned a lot.
01:06:45
Speaker
yeah I'm just curious, was there um did you did you mind going into a much larger corporation? Was there a big cultural change or it didn't really faze you at all?
01:06:56
Speaker
oh You know, it was it was interesting. i definitely learned a lot. One thing i think a really good operating principle for me is joining a big company through an acquisition is awesome. You have 18 months to make an impact, right? They treat you like an intrapreneur within the company, right? like you get you You're being brought in to drive a sea change.
01:07:26
Speaker
You get a lot of support, but you really have to make a dent on some things very quickly or the the the sheen starts to wear off, right? And as you mentioned early on, a lot of these acquisitions can fail because the integration of teams into existing cultures, corporate cultures, that that transition's not always positive, I think. the statistics are, you know, 50% or more will fail. We just hands have to look at AOL Tom Warner. Yeah. Or Tom Warner and whoever, right? Like it just keeps going. um
01:08:09
Speaker
But the –
01:08:13
Speaker
Yeah, I loved it. i It was great. It was a brand um that I already had affinity towards, you know, a lot of the games that EA produced. I was proud to be an employee of Electronic Arts. What what were a couple of the the big games that they produced during that period?
01:08:33
Speaker
Sims, obviously. okay Battlefield, Medal of Honor. um you know they acquired a lot of game companies madden football uh madden's one of the biggest all-time video games and fifa fifa you know consistently was number one worldwide um they had also done some pretty advanced things like rick john riccatello had this idea um
01:09:05
Speaker
for a game, it was called Majestic and it was, um, kind of an alternate reality game. Like you would get phone calls and, um, uh, and the story would unfold. I mean, it, it's perfect for now, right? Now's the time to do that game. It was so early on.
01:09:27
Speaker
Um, but it was something we talked a lot about at Jammed Out and, ah So it was exciting to be there. it was a great company. Still is. It just um is going through a major acquisition right now with ah the Saudis.
01:09:46
Speaker
are they Are they being acquired or they're acquiring somebody? Yeah. Is it going to be private equity or? No, the Saudi sovereign fund, PFI, i think is buying electronic arts.
01:10:01
Speaker
So going to private. Yeah. they Okay. so Yeah. So they are taking them private. Interesting. um So, so tell me about the years between ea and I guess, and TRIP. um What was, cause it looks like you did a few different things. I don't know. Oh yeah. So yeah.
01:10:20
Speaker
oh yeah so um I left EA, I went to a cloud gaming company called Gaikai, and it was funded by Benchmark and Qualcomm, so they knew me, and Dave Perry, who created the Earthworm Jim game, he was the CEO of it, and they had this cloud-based infrastructure where they were working with Limelight networks to deploy GPU, custom GPU racks in the cloud. And it's so interesting because now everyone's doing that to drive AI. But at the time it was to enable game streaming.
01:11:08
Speaker
Okay. And ah we looked very closely at Gaikai and their biggest competitor on live when I was at EA and i just couldn't believe what I was seeing. The Gaikai team showed up. They had Crisis, which is a very hardcore PC based video game streaming to an Android tablet that was like an $80 tablet, did not have the processing power to run that game. And, you know,
01:11:43
Speaker
It was an acceptable enough experience where you could actually play the game. And it was, I went, wow. And you know, when you have these experiences in hindsight, you look at like all the things you were learning. It was a completely different way to code an application. The application on the device was a very thin client that was essentially doing traffic shaping of the packets going back and forth. from from the the game service or the GPU in the cloud. And
01:12:20
Speaker
it um also gave me a lot of visibility into how that last mile delivery is really important for a good quality experience and latency.
01:12:33
Speaker
ah And so Gaikai got acquired by Sony PlayStation. Okay. Driving their game streaming service. which So Gaikai ended up as kind of the basis for Sony's online streaming today. Yeah. And um it needed to ultimately be plugged into bigger infrastructure. And similarly, like how YouTube really did need to be acquired by someone like Google so that
01:13:05
Speaker
you know, you could get sort of the cost per stream to a manageable, you know, deal with the unit economics that are in a healthy way. But the interesting thing about Gaikai was, you know, we all made it a bit of money off that deal. It was an all-cash acquisition. And i many of us invested in Oculus through that because six of the Gaikai team members went to go join Palmer and Brendan Uribe worked with us. He went to um be the CEO of Oculus. So we all invested in Oculus. And that um ah is um kind of what really sparked my interest in VR because obviously when you have an investment, you're kind of following along and ah Brendan invited me, my cousin Keanu, and... Was that happening before was that before or after the Kickstarter?
01:14:14
Speaker
It was after the Kickstarter and it was before Facebook bought them. so okay why I would imagine it was before Facebook bought them. So it was um ah when they needed to actually like make it happen and get it launched. And Brendan's an awesome awesome operator wonderful person to work with we had the best time working together at gaikai he's been a what what does he do these days he's uh uh running sesame the voice ai platform okay yeah the one that um uh i mean it's it's remarkable ah
01:14:55
Speaker
uh, their voice agent is amazing. And, um, he's got some other things, uh, in the works. I can't really talk about, but, um, uh, I'm, I'm always excited to at least put, you know, as much as I can into anything that Brendan is doing because, uh, he's an exciting entrepreneur. Um, anyway, so that we went down to the, um,
01:15:24
Speaker
Oculus office in Orange County. And Brendan wanted Keanu to try the new version of VR, you know, being Neo from the Matrix. And so we all went down and they were all excited that he was coming.
01:15:46
Speaker
And, you know, it was, again, one of those moments, the whole ride home, I kept thinking, wow, Could you, like, because the experiences were all really scary. I think if you look back at the beginning of the VR experiences when Oculus was coming to market, they were all pretty, like, you know, fear trigger fear, very viscerally, like make you feel like you're walking on a plank or you're going to fall off a cliff.
01:16:17
Speaker
Actually, I guess I'm i'm glad I didn't. that wasn't So my first experience, if if I can for a second, is um was on the HTC Vive, and it was Space Pirates.
01:16:28
Speaker
um And so that was you know maybe early 2016. I um i never had i didn didn't try the the yeah i didn't have a DK1.
01:16:38
Speaker
um and But what what was so exciting for me at the time was i was just so impressed with the quality of of the first generation game.
01:16:53
Speaker
um that to me, yeah you know, again, I so i started with an Atari 2600. So to me, that was the equivalent for VR. And I thought, man, this if this is what it first gen is like, what will it be like in five, six years?
01:17:07
Speaker
But thats that's that's really what got me extremely excited. I wasn't that excited about the games in VR. And I still don't play a lot of them. um I don't know. i find... ah ah them not as compelling as these other use cases. So you could see right away. Well, you know, on that day, um like it it really stuck with me, this question, if you could generate fear that easily in a person, what else could you make them feel, you know, through the power of immersion and ultimately pulling on that question led me to trip and the,
01:17:53
Speaker
idea of trip but you know when you when you look at um vr in general uh beat saber for me was really interesting because you could immediately feel the flow state it was triggering you know it was fully immersive you're getting real time ah feedback and reward communication. There's embodiment.
01:18:26
Speaker
The skill challenge ratio was so well balanced in that experience. And it's similar to like how I felt playing guitar player the first time with the rhythm.
01:18:40
Speaker
Right. Like it really like you lose, you have a different relationship to self. You Your relationship to time shifts and you get in a zone that ah is incredibly satisfying from just a human experience. I think it's still one of the top games for VR.
01:19:02
Speaker
Beat Saber. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and Res Infinite is another one that I really loved because, you know, it was designed to kind of trigger synesthesia. And so I just got really fascinated by the concept of could you create an experience that was um seeking the effect first as opposed to it being a secondary um byproduct of the game
01:19:35
Speaker
play and the game narrative and just go for the effect it would have on the person. And so you start digging into the research on that. You know, I was looking into it and reading some of the research that Giuseppe Riva had done on triggering states of awe in ah by using VR, um playing with scale, et cetera.
01:20:04
Speaker
um some of the stuff that Walter Greenleaf and Skip Rizzo have produced. And obviously I could see from a business standpoint that when they had started working on that, um those initiatives from a research standpoint, there was never ah in the ah in anyone's sites a commercially viable version of a headset that could be done at scale. But because of my relationship to the Oculus team, et cetera, I could see, oh we're about to see that. And so could this be the thing to lean into at this time? In much of the same way that when we started Jammed Up, everyone would say, you can't play. No one's going to ever want to play a game on their cell phone. And would go, I don't know, I kind of would, right? And ah could you use VR to create alternate states of reality without any kind of substance that could be architected to be beneficial?
01:21:16
Speaker
And that that led me to the idea for Trip. And then, you know, it was combined with some personal stuff, which I've spoken about very publicly that yeah My husband, who was a wonderful, wonderful man, ah beautiful meditation practice he had based in the Tibetan tradition, and he got diagnosed with cancer shortly after that trip to the Oculus office in Orange County, and he was gone very quickly. And, you know, emerging from grief, which kicked my ass, it required that I ask for professional help even. which was very humbling to me. And it's part of the reason why I talk about it publicly because think we want to be noble. you know Can I ask, was it was it that humbling? Because it sounded like, if if I remember you, you latched on to that um support in your late teens that seemed to have a significant impact on helping you with the meditation.
01:22:23
Speaker
I think as a business person and especially working with a bunch of dudes in the game industry, I had kind of developed a persona of like, oh, I can handle anything, you know?
01:22:35
Speaker
And then also- You became you became a tech bro. Yeah, I became a tech bro. But also being, ah ah you know, sober a long time, really active in the recovery community, supporting a lot of people, kind of being there for everyone else. And the, there was a lot of humility and realizing I couldn't muscle my way through grief.
01:23:02
Speaker
And, and there's also what I understand now, at least, you know, my, um, interpretation of what I went through watching my husband suffer at the end of life, um, kind of,
01:23:19
Speaker
Well, it it got me into some weird state of PTSD. and Can i ask, what why did he suffer? cancer is Cancer pain is no joke, even with drugs. and um Also, because he was um ah had a Buddhist practice, he really wanted to be alert during the death experience for him.
01:23:48
Speaker
Um, so for a long time, he didn't want to take any kind of medication to deal with the cancer pain, but at a certain point it just became too much for him. Yeah. We had to bring hospice in to help us manage his, comfort level at that point.
01:24:07
Speaker
Yeah. I'm sorry. Sorry for you having to go through that. And, and, uh, I just experienced hospice for the first time earlier this year. So, um Yeah, there' it's a wonderful um area of in a really important area to support and have ah to make sure that people know it's available to them, too. I think if anything, I wish I had brought them in earlier because they were so helpful and knowledgeable, like because I had a yeah I wanted to be the noble caregiver.
01:24:46
Speaker
And I needed help. So yeah yeah yeah yeah, you can't, that that's where you need a big community. Fortunately for us, our friend community was so massive and so created so much buoyancy for both of us during that, that it, you know, the tendency is to want to be very private. through that and to suffer through it, but you need people to show up for you. I mean, just even physically, because he was a a big man, I couldn't lift him myself, do you know? So just having help and that kind of support and then making sure that someone was with him so I could get some sleep. That was, I think, one of the most difficult things. So after, after he passed, you know, there was a recovery period of um and navigating what was happening to me emotionally, internally, but also restoring my physical health. And and then coming through that, and I did go to a grief recovery group. The our Our House organization in Los Angeles is an amazing program. They really, really helped me. And i they match you with people your own age with their own type of loss. So I was in a group of ah people my age, around my age who um had lost a spouse, very different from someone maybe older um because the likelihood of us getting married again, you know, was there.
01:26:31
Speaker
And, but, you know, ah just knowing I wasn't alone through how I was feeling really helped. and And then I eventually had to go to a therapist to kind of get unstuck on, ah you know, just sort of reliving those last eight weeks of Vic's life. And she really helped me start thinking about, you know, how do i rebuild my life going forward in a new way ah on my own, And that's where I realized it was also time for me to be CEO.
01:27:09
Speaker
I had helped everyone else's ideas come forth and been a part of that and contributed to it. But what was my idea? And I kept going back to that moment at the Oculus office and going, could you make someone feel something positive with this technology?
01:27:29
Speaker
And then, of course, you know, once I started noodling that, the big question, which is where I think a lot of companies in VR don't spend enough time on, especially on the healthcare side.
01:27:42
Speaker
Yes, you can make someone feel awe and wonder, the especially the first time they go into a VR headset. ah You know, just the experience of being in an alternate reality from the one your body is physically in, in and of itself is like, wow.
01:28:03
Speaker
But can you do it the second time? Can you do it the third time? How do you get them back in the headset when they're not walking around with it and like you have your mobile phone in your pocket every day? Those were all the questions like I immediately knew as somebody who had built a lot of software products that, you know, some that have been very successful, I started asking very early on in our journey.
01:28:31
Speaker
So do you do you think with, with what you just said, do you think the, the struggles of the space today, and and let's talk about vr virtual reality specific, you know, gaming full immersion, um, that is, uh, that, that the adoption is, is directly related to the ergonomics of the device, that the, the,
01:28:57
Speaker
is it is is it Is it as simple as that or is it much more complicated than that?
01:29:07
Speaker
Well, I think it's actually very complicated. I'm disappointed, as I'm sure many of us are, in how long it's taken to see the vision that all of us started thinking was going to show up.
01:29:25
Speaker
um Some of it is just the discomfort of the headset and the isolation of it. and um And going back to you know what we learned working at Gaikai,
01:29:40
Speaker
the the heaviness of the device is challenging. And if you can offload the GPU processing to the clouds, and have an experience with something that's much um lighter weight that you can really have more persistent in your life. Is that going to be what's needed to make it um much more broadly adopted?
01:30:14
Speaker
um I think so. um can you get that feeling of full immersion? I'm not sure yet how that happens, but I think you can do a lot with spatial. So I do think though that, you know, I was just looking at a review today from Trip because our CS team always surfaces up a review of the week and we got some wonderful reviews over the weekend. Still people saying this
01:30:48
Speaker
app is always there for me whenever I need it ah And it's changed my life, something I'm very proud of. So I still think there will always be a use case for immersion plus experiences like trip.
01:31:07
Speaker
um But is it going to be something that you do all day long every day? i don't think so. I don't think we're going to see that.
01:31:18
Speaker
I think we'll see something in augmented reality and glasses, lightweight glasses, or an audio AI enabled audio devices.
01:31:35
Speaker
um Yeah, I'm curious. I mean, i I don't know the answer to this. I'm curious what's what's lost ah from ah an impact on the brain or or ored effect when you go from full immersion to, you know, really good AR, you know, but you're still but you're still very aware of your surroundings and and Does that have a, i mean but let I mean, let's talk about maybe anesthetics or or using VR for pain distraction. is it Does it still have the same effects?
01:32:12
Speaker
I think that ah that use case will survive what's happening in the industry. So, I mean, you know, worst case scenario, a version of trips,
01:32:25
Speaker
can always be made made available on a VR device that can be used to facilitate essentially a respite that's architected to help you shift how you're feeling. And we have enough published ah research out there from the research community who has proactively picked up our application and studied it to say that we are very um effective at least some of the early data seems to indicate at de-escalating someone from an agitated state ah so you know I have a sauna in my backyard and sauna is something I use you know am I in my sauna all day long working no but I use it to promote
01:33:23
Speaker
ah good health for me and, um you know, and there's benefits, right? Some, like my husband will use it every day. He's faithful. I use it when I need it.
01:33:35
Speaker
And so I think that that use case for VR will always be present because there is enough data and it will continue to evolve ah um where you can measure the impact of, like what you said, the effects on the brain. And so but that exists. Is it be mass market? I don't know.
01:34:02
Speaker
Well, so kind of on this topic, let me ask you a couple of hard questions. Okay. I'm going to, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm going to assume that you're very proud of what you've built to date and the effect you've had on a significant number of people.
01:34:19
Speaker
Whatever the number significant is, I don't know, but you know more than one. had three million downloads. three million three million downloads 3 million downloads. So, so yeah which is pretty big in our category, right? But compared to mobile, et cetera, it's petite. Right.
01:34:37
Speaker
So how do you, and and I think this is the challenge that a lot of companies have when they're trying to build something for good and for having a positive impact on people.
01:34:49
Speaker
how do you balance the impact you're seeing you're having on individuals and, and a large number of individuals versus trying to make a ah sustainable company?
01:35:03
Speaker
And because I think, i think the last thing anyway, we would want to see is, um is trip go away because, ah because it's, it's not financially successful enough or whatever that, that success factor is.
01:35:20
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with you. It's the thing that keeps me up at night. You know, we are ah consistently, in fact, this week, the only wellness-focused product on the MetaQuest store in the top 50 of best-selling apps of the week, right? They they display that list.
01:35:42
Speaker
Trip is in it often. There's no other app. that in our category that appears on that list. um And yet, you know, I feel like at times I'm running a nonprofit, right, you know, which makes me crazy because we cost more to operate than we make. And so that's a struggle, you know, and I've i've been able to raise venture capital, ah and but at a certain point,
01:36:15
Speaker
it becomes really challenging to raise more capital for a market that is just not growing. And so for us though, because one of the core tenants of my career has been cross platform content distribution. It's what I did at Jamdad. It's what I did, you know, how how we shipped and distributed games across all different types of cell phones. There weren't any standardization back then. Right. And, um, same thing at EA and Gaikai really the promise of cloud gaming was to, um, uh, reduce the friction of streaming to multiple consumer touch points. So we launched trip with a mobile application. knowing it would be a key driver of getting people back into the headset and to be able to stay in touch with our customers when they weren't in headset. And I think it's been a huge contributing um driver of our our long-term customer retention, which is an outlier in VR. And then... um
01:37:31
Speaker
I am excited about this idea of layered reality. So we have never really focused solely on um VR only. We were one of the first apps on the NREAL platform. Now it's XREAL. We have an experience created Lens Studio for Snap.
01:37:54
Speaker
um We are already working looking at the Meta Ray-Bans wearables SDK that Meta released. ah Some of my devs went up to the Android XR workshop that they had last week. And, you know, Trip is one of the more broadly deployed applications in VR as well. yeah But that being said, like we have to grow more. And so i see doubling down on mobile and our AI features
01:38:27
Speaker
um really an important focus for us because our AI agent can also be available to you on AI glasses, any kind of ai audio.
01:38:40
Speaker
So it doesn't have to only be immersive. You can have immersive audio and persistent. so So let me, let me ask you another, let me ask you another really difficult question.
01:38:51
Speaker
Um, And I'm asking this because because we're talking about a category that is not a traditional game. it's not it it's a The outcomes and the and the purpose of it is very different from you know most industries.
01:39:11
Speaker
what does What does success look like at the end of the day for you? And what does it look like for your investors? Do they... Are they looking for, do they have a different perspective and expectation of what success for Trip looks like?
01:39:30
Speaker
Well, i mean, they all want what they call a 10 bagger, right? You know, ah a 10 X multiple on their investment. um Do they believe in VR today as much as they did 2017 when we first got funded?
01:39:49
Speaker
I don't think so, right, because the market's taken a long time to realize um in ah in a big way. So I think, like, being a VR-focused company, if you're solely VR-focused, it's hard to raise capital right now.
01:40:05
Speaker
um So how do you run a sustainable business? For us, it's necessary to scale cross-platform. I think as an entrepreneur who takes venture capital, you know I am obligated to do my best to get them their money back and make them whole, right? And ah that's sort of the minimum that you wanna shoot for. But I think you know it's always a risky investment.
01:40:39
Speaker
ah Startups, very few succeed, right? Uh, a funds returns will be a certain percentage of the fund allocation. Like not everyone's going to be a home run. So I think, um, uh, but for me, I look at the success, you know, the impact that we've had on people's lives is something I think is a huge metric of success. Um, uh, The fact that we even our mobile app make as much money that we do now, we're just starting to monetize mobile as well. So you can subscribe to Trip without having a headset. And hopefully you'll want to go cross platform because it's again, going back to that layered reality concept. But yeah, I mean, first and foremost, I'd love to get us to a path to profitability. And then, you know, i do want to make money for my investors. They believed in me at a time. ah
01:41:47
Speaker
um and I know that um ah my team as well, i want to see them have some of those great outcomes that I've experienced in my career.
01:42:00
Speaker
It was a game changer for me to be part of the jammed out team. I don't think I could have raised money for TRIP having not had a few successes in my back pocket to show up with an idea and even get the meetings. You know, I'm i'm in a women's group, and this is something I try to explain to them because they go, oh, I can't get funded because I'm a woman. And I just go, no, that's not. what it's about it's uh if you were a man without a track record you wouldn't even get the meanings either do you know it's not um i mean you know it's uh people invest repeatedly in many of the same entrepreneurs you can Look at that as being a boys club, but in many ways it's more like a winner's circle, right? Because it mitigates risk to fund repeat entrepreneurs. And so how do you get yourself into one of those companies that looks like it's going to hit a home run?
01:43:11
Speaker
pre-series B ideally and be part of that team because it'll open up so many doors for your own ideas downstream. That's something that I constantly communicate to people who ask for my advice on certain things. ah So, you know, my main goal is I want to make my team money and have a success in their back pocket, make my investors money,
01:43:36
Speaker
as well and do it in a way that is purpose driven and having real impact on people's lives. Like that was what emerged for me after Vic died, that I really wanted to take my efforts and make a difference in the world. And I think we have achieved that, but now I got to make the company successful, you know, beyond the small arena that we've been able to lead and become a category defining and category leader in this space. But How do i how do I hit a home run with this?
Gaming Industry Insights and Technology's Role
01:44:09
Speaker
It's something that keeps me up at night. I'm constantly thinking about it. And I'd love to hear do if you have any ideas, Bob. are you Actually, are you um are you looking at having Trip on the Switch and and PlayStation?
01:44:25
Speaker
oh That's interesting. You mean 2D versions of it? Well, yeah, but even, even with the switch, it's, you know, mobile for a lot of people and, and it's, it's a nice, really big mobile screen.
01:44:38
Speaker
Yeah. um And I, and I just think about, I think about the COVID days when animal crossing was such a big relief for so many people going through COVID because it was just such a relaxing, easygoing game.
01:44:51
Speaker
Trip was too, you know, that's where we saw a lot of our growth. Um, uh, the uh we yeah we're focusing on mobile right now and building out some uh features that ultimately will um start to scale out to um uh give you um a more connected feeling to other people um
01:45:23
Speaker
You know, as we're evolving our AI feature set, and I shared some of it in Iceland, um
01:45:31
Speaker
the ah a question keeps coming up for me. It's like, you know, if you ask yourself certain questions, they might lead you to that thread, right, that you pull on. And some ideas, um you know, I'll riff on for a couple weeks, and then I poke holes, and then I go, it's not a word. it's not worth chasing, but the one that I've been thinking about is how do you use AI to, um how do you put the human into the AI, the humanity into the AI? How do you use it in a way to connect people and, and give a sense of meaning and purpose? And there's something in that idea that I look at the evolution of a trip and,
01:46:22
Speaker
how do you you know build in network effects through that, that I think are gonna become more and more important going back to the beginning of this conversation of like the impact of ah ah an extended family, how that makes a child feel safer.
01:46:40
Speaker
i think as we get more and more isolated in our experiences through the use of technology, et cetera, And even the content glut that we're seeing of the AI slop hitting on feeds every day.
01:47:00
Speaker
i think you'll see young people start to want to play musical instruments, you know, and become artists and community coming together for live experiences.
01:47:14
Speaker
I don't know where I saw it. It was just in the last couple days, some ah actor or actress, but but there's somebody pontificating that we're, we're slowly becoming analog again. And like, I still can't, I mean, as much as I've tried, i can't enjoy reading on a tablet.
01:47:32
Speaker
know you know a magazine or a book or a newspaper. And um ah yeah there's something visceral to that. but Well, you know, books for me were my first virtual reality device, right? I would escape into them and you're in your visualizing worlds, et cetera.
Future Tech and Societal Impacts
01:47:55
Speaker
But I have noticed because of the nature of my work is reading all day.
01:48:01
Speaker
you know, i'm I'm online, I'm reading, I'm reading email, I'm interacting, I'm reading, I'm writing. I don't enjoy reading the same way anymore when I'm, um ah you know, I guess whatever downtime means to somebody who is- Well, you know, actually i and I hear where you're coming from. You might, just a suggestion is you might just try 15, 20 minutes um as you're going to bed. I mean, I, I, you know, as much as I would love to read for an hour, I i sometimes just can't, but, but just even getting through five pages and five pages a night. And then before you know it, you've, you're, you're halfway through. And I found that's a, you don't have to read a book in a day. You can read a, take six months to read a book too. I will, I will try that, be especially um avoiding screens before going to bed. That would be good.
01:48:56
Speaker
I do. i So just to kind of close out, i i um i I have a feeling that you're going to figure it out. and i mean, I think it might take 10 more years, but it might but I think there's there are so many opportunities. We are going through such...
01:49:12
Speaker
An unbelievable sea change that, you know, on a day to day, you don't, you don't, it's hard to see those sea change impacts. You see it occasionally. But I do think, you know, when we, when we look, I think 2030 is going to look radically different than 2025.
01:49:27
Speaker
What do you think it's going to look like? um
01:49:33
Speaker
You know, i think a i think, honestly, I think it depends on how quickly the cost of humanoid robots comes down and where we see that inserted in society. Because I do see some of the early successes for that in elderly care. Yeah.
01:49:50
Speaker
i support lifting somebody up that you can't lift by yourself. I think there's there's just a lot of interesting things there. and Yeah, I'm excited about taking our AI agent, Kokua, which is kind of um designed around real compassion ah and how do you embody that and how does the community inform it?
01:50:20
Speaker
And there's something interesting to me about that. Like how do you use the top of our funnel in a way to influence how a caregiving embodiment of emotional support might be.
01:50:40
Speaker
Yeah, I just met, ah there was a startup company that came across in in Brussels last week and a couple of guys from Berlin and and they built a um an AI avatar for for elderly, you know for an elderly person we will carry conversation on with.
01:50:55
Speaker
um Yeah, I mean, we we have a lot of elderly people using our AI already. um ah i don't, I'm not, you know, i i don't love the whole digital avatar concept I don't either, but but the reality is, i mean, having you know having seen my my father in the last two years in an elderly care facility, um there is so much isolation and loneliness, even in even in a care facility where there are other elderly people around you. um those individuals are very isolated depending on their individual situation. Well, what I'm not saying we don't support them with AI. I just don't love the concept of yeah a cartoon avatars. What if it was a humanoid robot as an AI? Well, yeah, I'm totally down with that. But all those elderly people can call our phone number and talk to our AI. It'll speak 30 different languages to them right now. It's like calling Santa 30 years ago. Yeah, call 833-HIKOKUA, and we won't charge you. You just can call and talk, and it'll ah remember what you said from one call to the other. You don't have to create an account. And that's an ah interface that older people are very comfortable with. So they don't need to look at a screen and talk to a cartoon.
01:52:23
Speaker
but what's What's the numbers again? Can you give me the numbers directly? Yeah. 833-Hai-Kokua. K-O-K-U-A. so just H-I-K-O-K-U-A. Yeah. 445-
01:52:32
Speaker
so just h i who yeah four for ah four four six wait know four four five I'm looking at the phone keypad. 6582. Okay. will be add okay i will i will be sure to Yeah, try it.
01:52:55
Speaker
yeah I still think, um I think there's an enterprise opportunity we still haven't cracked yet. I i still believe, and you know, whether, whether a full immersion headset's the right form factor or not, but I think there's such a great opportunity for yeah a supply plays with that and mental health application, whether it's Tripp or something else or or other complimentary and exercise. Yeah, I think Tripp,
01:53:20
Speaker
Can definitely, and because we can also be accessed without having the headset, it it supports all employees because not everybody loves being in the headset. Oh, exactly. that know ah So they can call the phone number, they can download our mobile app. ah We have our AI, we have our VR environments, which are super supportive. And yeah, I think enterprise is a good focus, but the challenge with early deployments that I've seen when we've you know we had some pretty awesome enterprise customers in our early days. i think in general, just even getting people to keep the headsets charged is operationally a challenge. Then when you get into hospital environments, having them be connected is a challenge. So you have to, we're doing an and NIH study with the New York office of mental health right now. And, and, You know, we have learned that we have to add separate hotspot and connect the devices to because of the hospital Wi-Fi access issues. and yeah
01:54:29
Speaker
And, you know, we've been working with New York Office of Mental Health for several years now, so we've been able to debug a lot
Trip Features and Community Appreciation
01:54:37
Speaker
of that. And they just got a very significant and NIH grant in the category of schizophrenia.
01:54:43
Speaker
And um they got a fast track award and they'll have a lot of fmri imaging in it at Cornell Weil. And so um I'm excited about it. ah But, you know, operationally, there's still some issues with the devices in field, right? yeah and um And if you talk to a lot of the enterprise and clinical focused VR companies, they struggle with, ah you know, it's easy to get that first agreement, to some extent, but do you get the renewals, right? Especially in enterprise wellness, it's very shiny object. yeah um They're always bringing in new things. They don't always renew the contracts. And so those are the metrics that matter in that business, right?
01:55:34
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not saying, i no I'm not saying it's easy at all. I just, it definitely, I mean, it it requires it requires success on both both sides. I mean, it requires a committed organization and HR department to follow through and stay on top of it.
01:55:48
Speaker
Yeah. Who do you think's doing that right? Right now? Oh, i I don't have an example to point out to you. i I maybe, maybe in a year I can give you one.
01:55:59
Speaker
um Yeah. There's some, the logistics things are operationally, I think um challenging, but if they can be solved,
01:56:10
Speaker
I agree with you. I think that there's a lot of opportunity there. So where where should people go if they want to give Trip as a holiday subscription?
01:56:21
Speaker
Oh, go to trip.com. Yeah, go to trip.com. The MetaQuest, the Meta3S Quest, MetaQuest 3S device. It's a great price. I think they're selling it this holiday under $200. The whole family can use it. There's wonderful fitness. apps on there. We just did a wonderful promotional offering with FitXR, team we really like, and they have one of the top apps on the MetaQuest. And ah so, you know, using it for that is a great use case. And ah ah you can buy, we have a whole gift card, you know,
01:57:12
Speaker
ah experience on trip.com that you can buy for somebody and ship it to them with their MetaQuest. i think she We're also available, we just launched on the Samsung Galaxy XR ah device that Samsung did with the Google team and with Qualcomm. And that's a great device. And we're one of the top meditation apps on the Apple Vision Pro, another wonderful device. So depending on how much you want to spend, there we're also on PlayStation. Yeah, we're on PlayStation VR as well. Oh, you are? Okay. okay Yeah, we're one of the only wellness apps on there.
01:57:59
Speaker
Well, yeah, I mean, well, if you're already in VR, you might a 2D version might be an easy opportunity and just maybe compare. Yeah, we're working on it on mobile right now. And and then we can expand to other screens. um ah But our Trip mobile app, um you can try it for seven days free. it We just launched a really cool feature that you can create.
01:58:23
Speaker
your own voice avatar. ah um So you can change the voice of our AI to your own voice. And we've seen people do some really creative things. You can create as many versions of voices you want. and we've seen people even have their loved ones create voices that they can select as the voice that guides them.
01:58:53
Speaker
And ah one man told us he had his wife do it. i mean, his, ah I'm sorry, his mother, who's at end of life. And another person said they had their nine-year-old son create a a voice avatar, and they love being guided and coached by in the voice of their child. So i think these go back to that thing that I was saying, um these feature ideas that we come up with. It's like, how do you enable something you can't experience in real life, um, in the physical world using technology. So, um, and then we have an amazing audio catalog of, um, awesome meditations from the Ram Dass organization, the Alan Watts, but also, beautiful ambient music, sound frequencies, eight hour sleep playlists that, um, are designed for different, um, outcomes to help you sleep more deeply. And so, yeah, it's a fun arena to play in this concept of how do you support someone ah with multiple layers of reality, even if it's just ambient sound in a way.
02:00:07
Speaker
Yep. so So it's trip with two Ps, T-R-I-P-P.com. Yep. um Nenea, it's been an absolute pleasure. i really enjoyed this conversation.
02:00:19
Speaker
And thank you for being as as open as you have been. um And i wish you the best Hanukkah and Christmas and Happy New Year. And ah ah I don't know. Well, let's see what 2026 holds for us Yeah, well, one thing can I just say um before we end, thank you to you, Bob, for everything you do for this community.
02:00:45
Speaker
You bring a lot of thought leadership on your own and create these these forums ah that I have felt very supported by in my journey as an entrepreneur. And I'm just very grateful.
02:01:02
Speaker
to be part of it and what you've done is is really an amazing contribution. So thank you for that. And yeah, let's all stay alive over the next 24 months and um and see what unfolds. We live in the most incredible time to be working in technology.
02:01:26
Speaker
And we're on the verge of seeing real experience on demand happen on multiple fronts. And obviously that can be used in positive ways, which is, you know, ultimately my goal. But, you know, there's a lot to be concerned about too. And we we need communities like yours to come together to share those concerns and focus on solutions.
02:01:57
Speaker
Well, Linnea, thank you those that you. You made my day with those comments and and close to tears. But so i think thank you again. I i i really enjoyed it. Take care. Thank you. Bye, Bob. Happy holidays.
02:02:09
Speaker
Bye.